Hi fellow selfhosters!
What hostnames do you use for your systems and services?
And maybe why if it’s an interesting story.
I’ll start:
Steam Deck: krax
Smartphone: krix (once I get LineageOS installed again)
MiniPC: krux
Reserved for future use: krex & krox
Creative, I know. 😅 The names have no deeper meaning. The x comes from Linux. That’s it.
I know some of you use god names of certain pantheons, such as Thor. But I find that boring as a lot of people are doing that.
Now let your pants down and tell me all about
your embarrassing host names!
Used to be names from Neuromancer like “ono-sendai” and variations of that.
Now laptop is “flat”, server is named after it’s purpose like log, mail, mon, hosting, storage, etc.
Every computer I own is an autobot. My primary machine is always Optimus Prime, has been since 2008. Other machines get other names generally slightly inspired by their role / nature. Bumblebee and CliffJumper are miniPCs of various persuasions, Preceptor is my “mess around with AI” box, my big server that handles most of my data and network services is Wheeljack, my Macbook is Mirage, my backup server is Powerglide, my TV (which is an old Dell all in One running Linux Mint) is UltraMagnus.
References to The Dark Tower or Murakami characters.
The printer’s name is Marvin, from HHGTTG.
It never wants to work and always complains.
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
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
Why not Saṃsāra? Or maybe it’s Rin’ne in Japanese?
My little pony. My pihole is pinkypie, mediaserver trottingham, homeassistant is ponyville, and my backup server is canterlot. And so on… :)
No.
Rock types and Greek gods. Everything from emerald to Aphrodite.
I have pebble, pabble, pibble, rebble, rabble, ribble and nibble.
Though the primary server is old enough that it was from a time when I named everything after Transformers, so it’s Shockwave.
pretty new setup but so far I’ve got
symmetra - synology dsm (nas)
junkrat - intel nuc main serverneed to name my desktop/laptop now and maybe networking gear. thinking ramattra for the router and zenyatta for the bridge
I Used Gondolin for my PC but after reinstalling I didn’t put it back on and left the default
For my ProxMox server stuff I went with Lord of the Rings. The idea being the servers would be locations and the VMs would characters.
So right now my main server is Rivendell, and my PiHole on it is Gandalf (“You shall not pass!” Heehee eventually he’ll have OPNSense too…)
If I get HomeAssistant at some point, obviously that’ll be Samwise!
My Klipper VM for 3D printing is Celebrimbor, and the individual printers are named after various deities or myth figures of crafting/smithing/creativity like Brigid and Eitri.
For my client devices, I name my personal hardware after BattleTech mechs and that works well. It’s intuitive because I can line up various roles and weight classes.
So my main desktop is Timberwolf, and my laptops are named after light mechs like Kitfox or Mistlynx.
Phones and tablets I don’t really care about, they usually just name themselves after their model anyway. :)
Naming my devices after stars. Specifically stars in Ursa-Major
Desktop: alioth Laptop: alkaid Smartphone: alcor SteamDeck: dubhe Server: sarir
Mine are named after the penguins from the Madagascar movie : Skipper, Private, Kowalski, and Rico.
Unfortunately there’s only four so I often supplement with a suffix. For example, I’ve got an old windows laptop kicking around that is “rico-w”
… I should really commit to a naming scheme with a wider array of options.
I named mine after Rocket League cars.
- Octane (main desktop)
- Breakout (laptop)
- Dominus (laptop; older, larger)