Selfhosted

I named mine after Rocket League cars.

• Octane (main desktop)
• Breakout (laptop)
• Dominus (laptop; older, larger)

My server is still called driveway because the install originated in an HP laptop a customer ran over with their car. Motherboard still worked though!

My only currently active machine is a laptop named buttwarmer as per my cat's suggestion.

I name them after a female important character in whatever novel I'm enjoying when I set the system up. Back when I was single the female was important, now it is just tradition.

Since I like fantasy there are plenty of names available that are both pronounceable and nonsense.

I use the names of greek deities for my host names, mostly geared towards the function of the server/computer.

• Nyx (dark-blue laptop)
• Hypnos (gaming machine)
• Argus (pi-hole and reverse proxy)
• Prometheus (minecraft server)

I use readable names.

I'm using one system for testing purposes, so it's called testingPC.

Any containers are named for the container purposes, like my pihole is named pihole.

My system is so boring that any person were to pick it up after I got hit by a bus would be able to figure out everything.

I tend to use food names, like tomato and sausage. But no potato, and definitely no apple.

I also utilize the special-use domain home.arpa for all my LAN systems, so accidental collisions are largely impossible.

All my hostnames are after Zen Buddhist concepts, like shikaku, hongaku, mushin, wuwei, jiyu, etc. My printer is the only thing that breaks this trend, it is named pos

Man I’m lame.

Used to be {env}-function##

Now it’s {env}-{vlanlocation}-function##

VLAN location such as DMZ, Infra, Jump for jump boxes, IOTSec or IOTInsec, Etc

I have three Proxmox nodes named: acid1, freebones, and a partially decommissioned node aptly named pve

acid1 was named from a sticker I got in a big collection. I was extra sold on the name when I did some research into acid1 tests.

freebones is from an inside joke from a GPT3.5 bot I terribly finetuned using my friend groups entire chat history. At one point the bot randomly said “algebra: you get free bones” and I kind of just ran with that

I think a similar post came few time ago, but no ashamed in my case. I use late pet names, for me as a tribute to their memory. Also, I try to put some logic in the name, like the squirrel name for a lightweight VM with not much services / workload or dog name for the reverse proxy (guardian function).

• Knowledge - Desktop
• Enlighten - Laptop
• Insanity - Server
• Madness - Router

I'm a fan of Composers. Current and past servers

• Bach
  • B.W.V. 565
  • B.W.V. 1067
  • B.W.V. 906
• Mozart
• Williams
• Goldsmith
• Zimmer
• Arnold
• Poledouris

New ones will be

• Giacchino
• Melumad

Services are just what they are.

• git
• Nextcloud
• APC
• etc

I use some generic names.

• Phone: phone
• Current Laptop: fedora
• Old laptop: laptop
• Router: openwrt

I went with Willow related naming.

My main server and NAS is Madmartigan. Proxmox server is Willow. Headless gaming machine is Sorsha. Bedroom/office laptop is Elora Danan Living room laptop is High Aldwin Then two raspberry Pi's named Rool and Franjean.

I'm not even into Willow that much, I just wanted to find a world of characters I liked.

Too many hosts.
Current scheme: British towns names. They are quite unique.

I select hostnames drawn from the ordinal numerals of whatever language I happen to be trying to learn. Recently, it was Japanese so the first host was named "ichiro", the second as "jiro", the third as "saburo".

Those are the romanized spellings of the original kanji characters: 一郎, 二郎, and 三郎. These aren't the ordinal numbers per-se (eg first, second, third) but are an old way of assigning given names to male children. They literally mean "first son", "second son", "third son".

Previously, I did French ordinal numbers, and the benefit of naming this way is that I can enumerate a countably infinite number of hosts lol

All my personal devices are named "AHE"+n. So the abbreviation for "at heart engineer"+ a letter signifying the device. So my phone is "AHEM", my laptop is "AHEL", my desktop is "aheo" (O for office), my server is "ahes".

I have been using Uranus moons for all my devices.

Ubiquitous and Tiamat are my servers, Polyglotal for my home assistant voice endpoint, and some more. Points for the reference

At home, colors Whatever color the purpose is.

Asterix & Obelix themed.

• Asterix is a rpi4, strong and small with ssd running dockers with homeassistant, revproxy and webserver, and camera storage.
• Idefix is a rpi3, mainly test only nowadays.
• Obelix is my desktop running voidlinux.

I used to have Pneumatix which is the mailman as the mail server and Panoramix, the druid, as domoticz server, Heroix, chief, as firewall and Bellefleur, beauty, as webserver 😉 All were LXD virtual servers on a pentium 3. I try to find a character matching the functionality. Except for domoticz all are now dockers on Asterix, so less use of funny names.

Non linux machines would be roman names from Asterix & Obelix, but I have none ..

At work we used famous dogs. Laika, Pluto, Cerberus etc

Charybdis, hippo, appa, Momo, pabu

I mostly use battlestar galactica ship names for my own hardware, but it's been mixed with boring '.mydomain.foo' names as well. I should rename a bunch of stuff around and include them in my DNS.

Places in video games is one option for me especially in cluster setups. EG cluster Tamriel has nodes Morrowind, Skyrim, Oblivion, etc.

I tend to use the names of angels for my personal devices (which surprisingly was inspired by this and not NGE)

For laptops I tend to use demons instead, just seems to fit better (which actually was inspired by Gundam IBO but this is the list)

For example:

• desktop (Linux side) is Raziel
• desktop (windows side 😩) is Azrael
• main laptop is Gusion
• eBay Thinkpad is Barbatos

I started with pirates of the carribean, so...

blackpearl: main PC Redpearl: raspberry pi Purplepearl: refurbished laptop. The router is ... router

The phone is zizidane ("donkey dick" in French, also playword on Zinedine Zidane).

Man I do variations of food truck that don’t exist. Example. Gaming pc : food station Phone:food truck Laptop: foodpad Server:foodcentre

localhost

Why: for privacy/anonymity concerns

I use Arthurian legend related stuff. Servers and desktops are locations. My portable devices are the names of swords. IoT devices are more explicitly descriptive since I won't need to type in, but it's more important to recognize them when I see them, like lightswitch-livingroom.

I use League of Legends regions. Except for one of them which is not a region but is called "lantern" after the Thresh's lantern in which souls are trapped.

So many answers!!

First it was from planets from Ursula Le Guin's Hainish cycle.

Now it's the names of birds visiting my feeder: chickadee, titmouse, mockingbird, etc.

I go for the unoriginal but oh so simple: location-type-No

So HL-SRV-01 is "homelab server no 1"

HS-DSK-02 is "House desktop no2"

NA-LPT-01 is "Not Applicable" because this is my admin laptop that I expect to move around a lot so I always treat it as high-risk.

I use concepts of games I like. Right now Alan Wake and Pacific Drive are the two of them.

• Main Laptop: Typewriter
• Steam deck: Poet
• NAS: The Lake
• Main Pc, that has become more a render station since I mostly work on a laptop and game on a steam deck: Lighthouse
• Hue Hub: Light switch
• Phone: Flashlight

But when I started to be more interested in networking and installed openwrt on my router, I was more infatuated by Pacific Drive:

• Router: Outer Containment Wall
• WiFi 5/2.4 Dual: ARDAnet
• WiFi for iot: RemnantNet
• GuestNet: OEZone
• VPN: BreacherNet
• Switch: SparkTower

I use the most boring names: LASTNAME-LAPTOP LASTNAME-PHONE LASTNAME-SERVER LASTNAME-ROUTER

But, living in tight suburban spaces, I'm never confused whether a device is mine or somebody else's.

Colour + noun:

• redbug
• bluecar
• yellowboat

I set up my current desktop while reading Gaiman's The Sandman, so it's called Morpheus. Because I felt I needed to keep with the theme, my laptop is hades, my phone persephone, my server apollo, my router helios, the media centre PC is orpheus, the pi that boots and updates it outside of usage hours is eurydice, and the pi that runs home assistant is zeus (because it's responsible for light(n)ing.

Oh, and the work profile on my phone is sisyphos.

Desktop: 30p87
Laptop: 30p87-laptop
Phone: 30p87-phone
Server: 30p87-server
DNS server at location bv: 30p87-dns-bv
DNS server at location db: 30p87-dns-db
Switch at location bv: 30p87-bottom-bv
Switch at location db: 30p87-bottom-db

Hardware hosts usually get a mix of hardware description and main use, e.g. en old Esprimo with Proxmox is esprimox. Virtual hosts are garden themed - auth server is mycel, monitoring will be called canopy once I move it, VM with lots of docker stuff is garden etc.

I gave up on cute or clever names a while ago; now I go with “storage0”, “router0”, “wap00”, “vmhost0”. Always with a numeric suffix because there will be a -1, -2 some day.

I name based on OS and location.

fedoraDesktop fedoraLaptop fedoraServer fedoraSchoolServer unraid qnap ubuntuServer