Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 3rd Feb 2009 19:06 UTC
In the News If you were to break into my network, getting to the contents of the right computer would be easy. I facilitate digital burglars by naming my computers according to what they actually are; my main desktop machine carries the label "Desktop", my Aspire One is imaginatively named "One", and this trend continues down to "PowerMac G4", "Ultra 5", and "T2". I always found giving computers real names was a tad bit wacky, but as it turns out, it can actually be very useful to give your servers and computers whimsical but meaningful names.
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Lord of the Rings
by thecwin on Tue 3rd Feb 2009 20:14 UTC
thecwin
Member since:
2006-01-04

I use Lord of the Rings characters for my home.
Laptops are named after hobbits, servers (VMs included) after elves, desktops after humans and the router is treebeard ;) Too bad it's not a ring network.

At work, everyone used to use whimsical names, but now they've switched to using WEB{n}, {Country Code}WRK{n}, etc. I'm finding it a lot harder to remember who/what is what, and repurposing/giving compuers extra tasks becomes a lot more difficult.

I think every machine should have a whimsical names, but have CNAMEs and such for purposes and regional organisation. That way, http.servers.domain and ftp.servers.domain can both contain a CNAME to a machine called Gimli! Now if only SRV records were more supported...

RE: Lord of the Rings
by Delgarde on Tue 3rd Feb 2009 20:20 in reply to "Lord of the Rings"
Delgarde Member since:
2008-08-19

I use Lord of the Rings characters for my home.
Laptops are named after hobbits, servers (VMs included) after elves, desktops after humans and the router is treebeard ;) Too bad it's not a ring network.


Heh... you're far from being the only geek doing that... I saw a claim once that there were over a hundred thousand machines called 'frodo' scattered across the internet... no idea if it's true.

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RE[2]: Lord of the Rings
by StephenBeDoper on Tue 3rd Feb 2009 23:47 in reply to "RE: Lord of the Rings"
StephenBeDoper Member since:
2005-07-06

Hah, "frodo" was the name of my desktop machine at my first job. All the machines there had names of either cartoon / comic strip characters or other fictional characters (the Sun server was Dilbert, there were two Macs called Mickey and Minnie, a pair of Linux servers called Popeye and Olive, etc).

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RE: Lord of the Rings
by erikharmon on Tue 3rd Feb 2009 21:52 in reply to "Lord of the Rings"
erikharmon Member since:
2007-06-20

I was a network intern at my high school back in the early-nineties where we had a token-ring Netware network with servers named after LOTR characters. A friend of mine working for the school district about four years ago pulled "Frodo" out of a dumpster and gave "him" to me. I managed to scavenge a SCSI drive out of it that's still working today, at least 14 years old.

My computers are all named after underworld deities, Persephone, Hades, Styx, etc, roughly according to the task they perform. Hades is my main file server, Styx is my router. Persephone is my laptop because it goes in and out of my network.

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