A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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In theme with my username:
My VMs are uninterestingly named after what they serve. Also I'm not touching my partner's machines, that stuff is not my problem.
I started at the top of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States and only take their first names, right now I'm at:
jeena@Abraham:~$ hostname
Abraham
I've gone for a Neon Genesis Evangelion theme, so my router is SEELE, my Pi server is TheMagi, Thinkpad is Unit-00, Laptop is Unit-02, work device is Unit-03 (waiting to build my gaming PC for Unit-01). Then my SimpleLogin aliases are weapons like the sonic knife or lance of longinus.
the names with no special meaning are generally older while the game references are generally newer :P
I'm pretty boring
HTPC (a vestige from when I used it as such, but now it's basically a Plex server and torrent box)
BIGNAS
HUGENAS
(My name)LAPTOP
Poor Avahi must get slaughtered on public networks.
Mine are all named after mythological creatures. It started with my tower being named Cerberus because it had 3 red LED fans and then just kept up from there. Hydra, Thoth, manticore, chimera. I'm deploying Baba Yaga this week, and Ratatoskr will be up eventually
Work laptop is dangerzone
Lazarus: My desktop PC that randomly died one day and would only work again after literally every component was replaced.
Akamas: My Fairphone 4, named after the son of Theseus, which was my Fairphone 3.
Maybe you should have named your desktop Theseus because of his ship.
I mean, yeah, given how I replaced everything. However, my Fairphone 3 (which, in case you don't know, is designed to have all components replacable) was already Theseus at that time, so I went for the 'resurrection' theme instead
A self built PC called "The Thing" and "The Beast", which is a raspberry pi.
I call my desktop loseldoom but my servers are fugit and opti :P
My computer names don't really have a pattern.
Desktop is Neutron, NAS hyperion, old server exscape.
Disks have names from astronomy. Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Pegasus, Orion.
I just recently named my large NAS RAIDZ2 array Laniakea.
Welcome to Cybertron:
Inferno - firewall
OmegaSupreme - hypervisor host
Cliffjumper - ssh jumpbox
Daytrader - webserver
Metroplex - Plex server
WheelJack - my PC
Not the most famous Transformers, but I try to keep the names relevant.
(There's more, but that's all I can think of off hand)
As for why, I don't know why I originally went this route. The phone is a Pixel 7, so it's name was inspired by the meme.
My servers all are named after their purpose, no theme for them lol.
My computer? Nikkis-pad, cause it always sat ontop of my big ol desk mousepad.
My phone???
Cream daddy of the abyss.
No I will not tell you why
My systems have names of Jupiter's moons. The main devices are named like the four Galilean moons.
Dune references. Caladan, Duncan, Arrakis.
Mine are also literary. They are references to Sanderson's cosmere series and the names chosen reflect their purpose.
I have an old optiplex SFF which is called Preservation because it has a disk drive for ripping media, it's a disk wiping station for repurposing drives, and it's old hardware I'm preserving.
All ~60,000 servers are given 32-bit UUID's, plus a 3 word CNAME from 3 unique and distinct lists of nouns. i.e. a server would have an A record of 1b30fafd-0a28-4999-b51f-bfa2b8af68e5 and a CNAME of tiger-ball-hill. A few servers that I often SSH into will be given friendly cnames like "bastion1" or "ansible" or something like that.
Canadian islands because I ran out of bears.
Question:
Let's say I do give my computers a fancy name in /etc/hostname - what do I need to do in order to use the hostname while ssh?
It's not like I have a domain controller resolving the hostname back to an internal ip...
If you mean initiating connections from one computer on your local network to another, you need to install and enable avahi-daemon (or some other mDNS daemon) on the "fancy" one. Your router also needs to support and enable mDNS forwarding, but basically all of them do by default. Then just use your-hostname.local in place of the local IP address, and your computer will automatically resolve it using mDNS. It's different than regular DNS, so it doesn't need any special configuration to use it. And word to the wise: don't use uppercase or special characters in your hostname.
My server is named ubuntu. You can guess why. My laptop is named MacBook-Air, because I didn’t change the default.
I’m thinking of naming my next server GladOS and the desktop Wheatley.
I use the periodic table of elements to name them.
Desktop. Tablet. Garage. Pretty straightforward at my place lol
Daedalus, because I like the sound of it.
The Void - My phone
At home I name all devices after characters or planets from Ready Player One and Two. WadeWatts, parzival, daito, shoto, halliday and OASIS are my PC, laptop, phone, router, NAS or WiFi. I also have servers named ir0k, art3mis or halcydonia. I remember working at a science project years ago with lots of workstations, where we named them all after James Bond villains like Stromberg, Goldfinger or Scaramanga. Eventually we ran out of villains and had to number them. 🙃
I used to name all my devices and servers after old timey womens names but I gut lazy. Now they are named mostly by function.
My NAS is named "lil-nas-s". Everything else has boring names, my proxmox host is just named "proxmox".
Nice try, fed. :P
Mush bevause my windows VM is named Room
My machines are named after physicists and mathematicians because that's what I aspire to be. I don't remember the first three, but the most recent ones were Descartes, Euclid, Fourier, Gauss, Hilbert, Ivakhnenko, Jacobi, Kepler, Lovelace, Mandelbrot, Newton, Oppenheimer, Penrose, Quillen, Russell, Silverman[1]. Next will be Turing.
EDIT: The network storage is named differently.
I started naming all of my devices based on their number mk1-mk6, then I realized it's hard to differentiate desktop from phone off a list. Now I've got: Mkr1 - rack server Mkp6 - phone 6 And desktops/laptops are just mkX depending on age. Then set static IPs based on their number
"The Cool Side of the Pillow"
(I only have the one)
computer, laptop, single board computer name, auto, build server
I name devices after what their purpose is and what they do + number.
Albatross and Nautilus. Not really sure why, just like the sound of the words and the nautical theme. I still have 2 or 3 laying around unnamed because I haven't thought of any good words that fit the theme
I started using star names a long time ago and never had a reason to change (night sky - not Hollywood, though those are good choices too).