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!
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)
My two wifi bands have always been Castor and Pollux.
Server (big iron): Bender
Desktop (main character): Fry
Laptop (for accounting): Hermes
Netbook (small and dumb): Nibbler
Phone (held to my head): BrainSlug
HTPC (one big viewport): Leela
This is my scheme as well! Pretty much to the t. Except my HTPC is hypnotoad and nibbler is my NAS.
OMG Hypnotoad HTPC is so much better! Why didn’t I thnnk of that?
The printer’s name is Marvin, from HHGTTG.
It never wants to work and always complains.
I originally named all my hardware after members of the Wu-Tang Clan plus some close affiliates, but I actually ran out of names, so now I use MFDOOM aliases for my workstations, and keep Wu-Tang for infrastructure, because it’s for the children.
I take a word that’s related to the purpose of the new host and put it in an online translator and cycle through languages until I get something cool.
What names has this process come up with?
my local hostnames are all David Bowie related. I have: outside (my laptop) blackstar (server 1) starman (server 2) heros (desktop1)
I’ve always done characters from Beatles songs
- Walrus
- Martha
- Her-Majesty
- Submarine
- MissLizzy
- Blackbird
- NowhereMan
- SgtPepper
- Jojo
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
My home network is called The IT Clowd with these devices:
- Moss - physical server
- Roy - physical server
- Jen - vm - main docker host
- Richmond - vm - *arr stack
- Denholm - vm - management, monitoring
- Douglas - vm - Home Assistant stack
- Basement - vm - development server
Lol your arr stack.
"Jen what did you do?! I told you never open that door!"
localhost
Why: for privacy/anonymity concerns
Hmm, what does localhost.local do if you use mdns?
Also, your router must be a bit confusing:
- localhost - 192.168.1.2
- localhost - 192.168.1.3
- …
Fixes IP for me, but I admit I don’t have a lot of services to access to like OP does
- Knowledge - Desktop
- Enlighten - Laptop
- Insanity - Server
- Madness - Router
Gotta say, from what I’ve heard from the trenches, “insanity” and “madness” sound like fantastic names for printers or print servers, but the router also makes perfect sense! Lol
I just memorise the IPs lmao. then again I only have 1 or 2 hosts up on my network ever
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.
Why limit yourself to the penguins?
Rock types and Greek gods. Everything from emerald to Aphrodite.
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. :)