My main server is named Postulate (an idea that you assume for the sake of argument), my desktop is named Axiom (a proved postulate), and my backup server is named Corollary (an idea that follows from an axiom).
I use famous computer scientists. Torvalds, Kernighan, Ritchie, Woz (for the MacBook). My most recent one was bought in Hampton VA, so I named it kjohnson after Katherine Johnson (as seen in the movie Hidden Figures, she used to work at the NASA facility in Hampton).
I think it’s a good system, and I don’t think I’ll ever run out!
I like to have different naming schemes for different device classes.
Desktop computers: Greek gods
Laptops: Elements of the periodic table
Cloud servers: Norse gods
Home servers: Planets of the solar system
Raspberry Pis: Greek titans
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.
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.
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.
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.
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