Characters from the Murderbot Dairies, mostly

• main laptop (t480 currently) – Murderbot;
• previous main laptop (x270) – MB20;
• homeserver – ART;
• a TV box running armbian – Miki;
• t440p is currently Behemoth (from Bulgakov’s “Мастер и Маргарита”), although I’ll probably rename it to Holism;
• x230t – Three;
• a random thin client I occasionally use to test stuff is yogurt (from" love, death & robots"), not sure if I’ll rename them.

I named mine after Rocket League cars.

• Octane (main desktop)
• Breakout (laptop)
• Dominus (laptop; older, larger)

I name them after a female important character in whatever novel I’m enjoying when I set the system up. Back when I was single the female was important, now it is just tradition.

Since I like fantasy there are plenty of names available that are both pronounceable and nonsense.

Too many hosts.
Current scheme: British towns names. They are quite unique.

Named mine after “objects” from Iain M. Banks’ Culture Novels.

Currently I have:

• gsv
• hub
• excession
• drone

Nice and short, and map roughly to the “power level” of the hardware, so to speak.

And my Yubikeys are named after Special Circumstances agents 😄

Devices are named after characters from books I recently read, trying to match the name with the character of the book. But for virtual hosts for services I use their purpose (wiki, files, feed…) because I wasted too much time updating all the bookmarks last time I migrated to a new server.

I use readable names.

I’m using one system for testing purposes, so it’s called testingPC.

Any containers are named for the container purposes, like my pihole is named pihole.

My system is so boring that any person were to pick it up after I got hit by a bus would be able to figure out everything.

I gave up on cute or clever names a while ago; now I go with “storage0”, “router0”, “wap00”, “vmhost0”. Always with a numeric suffix because there will be a -1, -2 some day.

They’re all some kind of machine. Steam deck: SteamMachineryV1

PC: ArchMachineryV2

Phone: Android_μMachine

Oddly enough my server goes by MonoVerse, which I named first and I guess it just stuck.

I use some generic names.

• Phone: phone
• Current Laptop: fedora
• Old laptop: laptop
• Router: openwrt

Hardware hosts usually get a mix of hardware description and main use, e.g. en old Esprimo with Proxmox is esprimox. Virtual hosts are garden themed - auth server is mycel, monitoring will be called canopy once I move it, VM with lots of docker stuff is garden etc.

They’re all some kind of machine. Steam deck: SteamMachineryV1

PC: ArchMachineryV2

Phone: Android_μMachine

Oddly enough my server goes by MonoVerse, which I named first and I guess it just stuck.

Current homelab+desktop+laptop host count here is 22. All anime characters or references. It’s a fairly large pool to pull from, so it’s worked for me for 20+ years now. Mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc) and game consoles aren’t really as clever though.

All of them are in a piHole DNS though so no host files keeps it easy to track. Services have names that mostly are just what they are though and cnames to the matching host that hosts them (or load balancer, whatever)

I name based on OS and location.

fedoraDesktop fedoraLaptop fedoraServer fedoraSchoolServer unraid qnap ubuntuServer

I tend to use food names, like tomato and sausage. But no potato, and definitely no apple.

I also utilize the special-use domain home.arpa for all my LAN systems, so accidental collisions are largely impossible.