Why Do We Name Servers the Way We Do?

jfruhlinger writes "If you use a Unix machine, it probably has a funny name. And if you work in an environment where there are multiple Unix machines, they probably have funny names that are variations on a theme. No, you're not the only one! This article explores the phenomenon, showing that even the CIA uses a whimsical server naming scheme." What are some of your best (worst?) naming schemes?

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Snow White Theme

[Anonymous Coward]

Old Reader's Digest Joke:

Seven terminals named Doc, Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, . . ., and a printer named "Handsome Prints". :-)

Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[Rei]

My main server (which used to break all the time) is named Ultron, while various other computers and printers on the network have names such as Zebranki, Greenish, and Spathi.

D-d-d-dupe

[pwnies]

I like that in this edition of Duplicate Stories on /. Monthly, the link in the story actually links back to a previous story [slashdot.org] that's asking the same thing! Thanks for saving us the few seconds of searching for the older stories on this one /.!

We have a Dr. Seuss theme ...

[Anonymous Coward]

...after spending the entire Christmas break re-installing and re-configuring a friend's Win98 box one year, when its harddrive failed. We named it "The Grinch".

e.g. Richard Simmons

[Anonymous Coward]

I name all my Unix servers after famous eunuchs.

Re:Wines, cheeses, trees

[Rei]

Well, not sure about where you are, but around here, adnauseum is the mail server.

mac addresses

[Anonymous Coward]

I name each of my servers the name of another computer's mac address on the network. This way, as part of my retirement package I'll have the joyous knowledge that the person who takes over my position is going insane.

Porn stars

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to run a fairly lucrative business at a time when a certain industry was much more profitable... JennaJameson would always go down while RonJeremy would always be up.

Coincidence? I think not.

Names

[Anonymous Coward]

Taken individually, the names "trojan", "ramses" and "sheik" may not mean much, but taken together... Took a while for the boss to pick up on that theme...

Never owned a server, but...

[greenguy]

I had a series of Macs before I became a diehard Linux guy. I didn't know I could name the first one, but then came Mac and Cheese, Mac Truck and Fanfare for the Common Mac (around the time of Copeland).

Why? Because I could.

My nonsensical method

[fuelvolts]

I name my PCs/Servers by the core name of the CPU:
My desktop is "Agena" (Phenom X4)
Laptop is "Trinidad" (Turion X2)
Wife's Laptop is "Merom" (Celly)
File Server is "Sparta" (AM2 Sempron)


I've been doing this for years and it's a built in reminder that I need to upgrade whenever I connect to another machine. ;)

The Simpsons

[Jon.Laslow]

The admin before me loved The Simpsons - it's especially funny when one of the servers crashes, and someone yells 'Hey, Homer just went down on me!'

(Yes, there's a similar bash.org quote involving Pokemon, but this actually happens)

Re:Snow White Theme

[Anonymous Coward]

Old Reader's Digest Joke:

Seven terminals named Doc, Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, . . ., and a printer named "Handsome Prints". :-)

With a bat lying next to it named "Snow White"? You know, to keep the dwarfs working in the diamond mine and to fuck the printer?

Surnames

[jrothwell97]

All my computers are named after famous computerists. For example, Welchman. Turing. Babbage. (The exception is my old laptop, named after Richard Hammond.)

My phones are also given surnames: Stubblefield, Adams, etc.

All my iPods are called Steve.

Re:Artificial Intelligences

[Anonymous Coward]

...but I later decided on naming them after AIs.

Roker?
Jolsen?
Sharpton?
Yankovic?
Gore?

Oh, wait...

The story's server has a funny name, too

[GroeFaZ]

"Unable to connect to database server"

You name them after computer parts

[kcbanner]

So when something goes wrong, people sound like morons: "Why is motherboard down!?" "I can't connect to RAM!"

"Goofy" naming scheme?

[mangu]

Great idea! Let's name the others "Mickey", "Minnie", and "Pluto"

Re:Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[Rei]

Surprise and terror! :)

Attention big, mean, hostile alien programmer accessing this server in an obvious attack posture:
This is Spathi Captain Fwiffo. I know you are going to hack my system, so let's just get this over with right now.
The coordinates of my file server, Spathiwa, are 241.6.36.87, and the ultra-secret root password, which is known only by me and several billion other Spathi, is `Huffi-Muffi-Guffi'

---

Q: Here's an argument I've been having....Spathi have shells or no?
A: I think Spathi's didn't naturally have shells, but based on their desire for safety, they might adopt them as a fashion.
  -- 1998 IRC chat with Toys for Bob

Re:Worst naming scheme:

[the white plague]

It gives your customers something to chuckle over during traceroutes too. Why settle for letting them discover they traversed v11s0p1.dal01.blahblahblah.net, when you could let them know that they went through thebeast.bbb.net or ratbastard.wehateourjobs.com?

Whimsical Conference room names

[bwhaley]

Ok, this drives me nuts. It's a little off topic, since it's names of conference rooms instead of server names, but the concept is the same.

Here in Colorado, we have 54 mountain peaks that are > 14,000 feet. They're referred to as "fourteeners," and they all (of course) have names.

Every company in Denver thinks they're damn clever by naming their conference rooms after the fourteeners. I don't know how many Long's Peak and Mount Evans conference rooms I've sat in, but it makes me want to hurl my chair at the window.

Ok, time for my anger management class. =p

Re:naming

[tsa]

...and period3 means that you're 12 years old and just started puberty?

I know a name for itworlds new mysql server

[kcbanner]

"slashdotted". In memory of what happened to the old one.

"The Turtles"

[knapper_tech]

Splinter(head node)
Leonardo
Donatello
Rafael
Michelangelo

Just a little make-shift cluster for large Blender renders implemented with Dr. Q. Splinter told the turtles what to do.

ASSassin
Asian Student Society...assin. A gentoo box built for hosting a website for Asian Student Interest Advocates.

Re:Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, that was no upgrading, you just bought new computers and named them the same. It's like calling your new girlfriend by your old girlfriend's name.

Pants are down

[JungleBoy]

Our usenet upstream provider used to call their main server Pants. Their admin said, "If pants is down, we're fucked."

Re:Artificial Intelligences

[Tubal-Cain]

No, natural blondes that have dyed their hair.

Re:Wines, cheeses, trees

[ushering05401]

If obscurity is not a chief objective you could latinize the server's functions. Mailicus, Proxius, Validicus etc..

Add in some major/minor modifiers and you are in business.

I agree

[mangu]

Yes, I name my servers after mythological beings, too.

Bad names for test servers

[kmahan]

I got in trouble for following the despair.com naming scheme for our test servers:

        failure
        crash
        burnout
        apathy
        mistake
        stupidity ...

I thought the test reports were entertaining. Management not so much.

Re:"Goofy" naming scheme?

[mangu]

Pluto -> "Saturn", "Mars", "Tellus", "Uranus"
  What's the next series?

"Urballs", "Urpenis", "Urnavel"...

Re:Females in music

[Galactic Dominator]

What is this "females" of which you speak?

Disease names used for Windows Servers

[ahbond]

My favorite naming scheme was when I worked at Fujitsu Network Communications. The IT Admins used disease names for Windows 2000 Servers. e.g. CANCER PLAGUE MALARIA EBOLA etc.. I was surprised they could get away with it, but they did (It was a development environment though) Cheers, ahb.

Futurama Naming Scheme

[dominator]

My laptop: Fry
Wife's: Leela
Wife's old laptop: Amy
Printer: Zoidberg (dispenses ink)
Router: Bender ("bends" packets)
OLPC XO Laptop: Kiff (both small and green)
Car: Planet Express Ship (with which the 2006 Honda Civic [rediff.com] shares a striking resemblance)
Cat: Zapp (cavalier, not too bright, doesn't wear pants).

I've been told by wifie that future pet names will include "Nibbler" and "Scruffy".

Re:Apparently odd naming often has a purpose

[FuzzyPlushroom]

...and logically, Cats 5 and 6 would be very similar in appearance, but Cat 6 would end up able to chase mice ten times faster.

Re:The Simpsons

[PPH]

We had a Simpsons fan where I used to work, When our engineering groups got our first workstations, he named his 'homer' and suggested that we follow suit. We named ours 'ulysses'.

Re:Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[Super Jamie]

OR, intentionally getting a new girlfriend with the same name as the last one ;)

Re:mac addresses

[pklinken]

One of the lesser known virtues of ipv6 I'm sure!

Re:Gort

[Anonymous Coward]

Power outage or it's not true!

Dumb IT people

[JustNiz]

I remember a place where I worked once got 7 new Sun servers.
There was a competition to see who could come up with suggestions for good host names. The winning suggestion was to name them after the 7 dwarfs.
The next day I logged in and saw IT had added the 7 new servers to the network.
They had named them dwarf1, dwarf2, dwarf3...

Re:Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's not! He took his data and (parts of) his applications' settings with him each time I would guess.

So it's more like extracting his old girlfriend's brain and stuffing it in his new girlfriend's head. ... and _then_ calling her by the old girlfriend's name.

Re:Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gesundheit!

Let's just say the Dallas server...

[randmcnatt]

...was named "Debbie"

Re:Diseases

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll get less complaints from the users... Nothing like calling the helpdesk because you're having a problem with gonorrhea...

Re:Wines, cheeses, trees

[vux984]

A little extra work for us, but we have ways internally of handling this issue without much headache.

If your going for obscurity I'd go the other way... give some old pentium 1 with a copy of tradewars2000 in a closet the name 'auth-pay-master', and the your main server something like 'help-desk-print-server' ;)

Re:Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[russotto]

OR, intentionally getting a new girlfriend with the same name as the last one ;)

Saves a fortune in tattoo removal.

Re:Snow White Theme

[cinderblock]

Our plotter's name is Gutenberg. Maybe we should have used that name for the photocopier...

Man-made disasters

[GuruBuckaroo]

ThreeMile, Valdez, Congress, HyattKC, PruitIgoe (ok, a little local, look it up). Damn, there were more, but I can't remember them anymore.

Re:Yay for colours!

[Dzimas]

I rue the day a colorblind co-worker unwittingly annihilates your production server. :)

Well

[AVryhof]

I named all of mine George

Re:Server names

[russotto]

my laptop is Ockham.

Thus, if you tether your Motorola cell phone to your laptop, you end up with Ockham's RAZR.

Re:Yay for colours!

[jonaskoelker]

Happed to one of my colleagues... He was reading reddit when he blueit.

Re:Wines, cheeses, trees

[gardyloo]

Naming the server "Hezbollah" and having a bunch of cnames point to it ensures you can easily move a service at any later time without having to rename the server.

      Right. It also means that if there's a horrible disk crash, the FBI and NSA no doubt have several nice backup copies from last Friday you can borrow.

Re:Wines, cheeses, trees

[betterunixthanunix]

Personally, I prefer to name my servers after women I have been...involved...with. This easily covers hundreds of systems.

Re:You name them after computer parts

[Molochi]

Now you went and made me want to name a computer "Babby."

Re:Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[rvqbl]

Speaking of breaking all the time, a friend named a mainframe Linda Lovelace because it sucked so much and went down on you all the time...

Re:Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[Anonymous Coward]

oblig HA HA

Re:Wines, cheeses, trees

[BluBrick]

So that'd be virtual machines, then?

Re:Periodic Table

[jhealy1024]

Don't forget the most important part: the host part of the IP address should be the element's atomic number (e.g., "Einsteinium" -> 192.168.0.99).

Re:Wines, cheeses, trees

[Samah]

Even better, you could Pig-Latinise them. Ailmay, Oxypray, Alidatorvay, and (my favourite) Irewallfay!

Re:Snow

[adnonsense]

If your wii is yuki, you might want to see a doctor!

Whoops

[ammaro]

We reused an old piece of junk machine as a print server in our development lab, which was connected to the enterprise network. We gave it an appropriately descriptive name, Dungpile. Little did we know that in its prior life Dungpile had been configured as a DHCP server. (We didn't look at it too closely... our bad.) One day we hear a frazzled guy from the IT department going door to door crying, "I'm looking for Dungpile! Does anyone know where Dungpile is?" It turns out the enterprise DHCP server had a hiccup, and in the subsequent negotiation for which backup would take over, Dungpile won out. Our little print server started handing out 10.10.*.* IP addresses (it was evidently set up for a private network) to the enterprise workstations. That worked very poorly. The IT folks could tell the bogus addresses were coming from a machine called Dungpile, but didn't know where it was located. (I don't know why they didn't just boot Dungpile and force their primary server to resume duties. The weren't a great team.) Anyway, it made my day hearing someone wandering the hall yelling about finding dungpile.

Re:Our server

[Tubal-Cain]

And perhaps because of a certain background process you keep running in the background?

Re:Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[Spatial]

Nelson is not responding to ping

*Points* Haaa-haaa.

Medical Conditions

[IAmCthulhu]

I was a network admin for a small law office, and I named all their computers after medical conditions. I named the senior partner's computer 'IMPOTENCE' hoping that someday he'd come to me and tell me that he was having problems with impotence and that he couldn't get it to come up.

Re:Slashdot

[linhares]

Jenna Jameson Briana Banks Devon Tera Patrick Stormy Daniels Silvia Saint Janine Lindemulder Crissy Moran Jesse Jane Gauge Krystal Steal Nicole Sheridan Tawny Roberts Mercedez Amber Michaels Brittney Skye Catalina Cruz Miko Lee Veronica Zemanova Houston Lanni Barbie Shyla Stylez Racquel Darrian Teagan Presley Mindy Vega Alicia Rhodes Rita Faltoyano Adele Stephens Susana Spears Aria Giovanni Kobe Tai Erica Campbell Gina Lynn Kelly Madison Eva Angelina Adriana Sage Jill Kelly Sky Lopez Puma Swede Chloe Jones Jasmin St. Claire Anita Dark Nikki Nova Terri Summers Belladonna SaRenna Lee Jana Cova Carmen Luvana Jenna Haze Danni Ashe Anetta Keys Sydney Moon Lisa Sparxxx Zdenka Podkapova Sydnee Steele Kyla Cole Taylor Rain Alaura Eden Asia Carrera Gina Ryder Devinn Lane Sophie Sweet Kim Chambers Jodie Moore Alexis Amore Bobbi Eden Rachel Aziani Raylene Aimee Sweet Katsumi Stephanie Swift Brandi Lyons Lovette Amy Reid Lonnie Waters Jewel De' Nyle Angelica Sin Alexa Rae Aurora Snow Tanya Danielle Sandra Shine Avy Scott Tiffany Mynx Cherokee Pantera Tabitha Stern Chloe Dior Ava Devine Dasha Isabella Camille Niki Blond Daniella Rush Kelle Marie Ashton Moore Charmane Star Allysin Chaynes Courtney Cummz Katja Kassin Shay Sweet Penny Flame

Re:Break it down

[thogard]

The phonetic alphabet can be a great time server... "Ok you need to find the server tawks in the rack. that is T-A-W-K-S as in Tsunami Are Why Knot Sea."

My home servers (that live in data centers?) are called things on a "0" theme. Knot, Naught, Not, Knotty, 0.

For work I'm thinking about pc### where ### is the phone extension and dhcp will hand out 192.186.1.177 to the person at extension 177. It should make it easier to locate problem machines.

I use names of past lovers...

[raehl]

First server was nobody, followed by righty, lefty, and fleshlight.

Next up is fido.

What? I just need an echomail gateway.

Re:Slashdot

[teklob]

There is a lab at school with about 30 boxes all running scientific linux but each one is named after a different distro... kubuntu, fedora, yellowdog etc etc. Why? I suppose someone thought it would be funny to those in the know and confusing as hell to anyone trying to learn linux. Took me a few days even.

Oh man ...

[Greedo]

You can name servers? And here I was memorizing IPs ...

T-t-t-trip

[zobier]

The previous story links to a previous story [slashdot.org] too.

Re:Why...

[LaskoVortex]

I'd argue with you because it seems like you are arguing, but I can't really pinpoint your thesis. However, if I could figure out your argument, rest assured, I'd prove you categorically mistaken.

Re:Rebel

[dotancohen]

mod this one up!

I remember the first computer I networked I changed so it showed up as H3110 (Hello) ... since they insisted on numbers.

H3110 is a number? I think that the numbers end at F.

Re:Well, I'm currently using Fwiffo.

[rdebath]

No that should be Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus and Zathrus.

Oops, sorry, Zathrus isn't there any more.

Re:Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm doing a penetration test with Luvana now.

Re:Slashdot

[Jurily]

OMG, I just found my new naming convention. Thank you soooooo much! Brilliant, just freaking brilliant.

Please don't. Unless you want your boxes to go down a lot.

Re:Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm Welsh, you insensitive clod, now then.

Re:Gomco, Mogen, Plastibell.

[Hognoxious]

Chop the whole thing off and I'm sure you could get even more of a reduction.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Why...

[Ihmhi]

Although it may be healthy to project personalities onto things (I'm a little skeptical, though I could maybe be persuaded by somebody who doesn't go around making sweeping psychiatric diagnoses of people he's never met) that hardly justifies encoding those projections into names.

My printer wastes my time, money, and annoys the hell out of me without ever really doing any work - so I named it after my ex-girlfriend.

Re:Why...

[Windows_NT]

We kinda do the same thing, our servers are named form the solar system. mars, jupiter, saturn, mercury . moons too: phobos etc ... There easy names to remember, and a good scheme ... Too bad we couldnt use starwars themes ... The death star is down, reboot!

Re:Slashdot

[seanellis]

Got to be careful with this. It only takes an extension and a few more meeting rooms before you are asking people to meet in the Cradle of Filth.

Re:Why...

[dimeglio]

Here at the (anonymous) clinic we give our servers the name of disorders and conditions.

Guess which server had RAM problems?
Emphysema suddenly shutdown one day when its fan locked-up and overheated.
All MS servers have names of various cancers. Macabre yes, but it keeps them from spreading.

Our IT staff sounds quite impressive to the MDs when they're chatting in the cafeteria.

Psychoanalyze that!

Re:Why...

[Ihmhi]

Incidentally, my ex-girlfriend's name was Lexmark, so it all works out!