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What is your machine naming scheme? (startrek.website)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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I've ended up with a number of machines on my network, and a need to name them all in a somewhat logical way. For several years I had them named after the planets, which worked well until the PCs for myself, my girlfriend, servers and Raspberry Pi's quickly summed up to more than the eight planets. I've broadened it somewhat to include any Greek/Roman mythological figure, but the system is definitely not as clean as it used to be.

Do you have a coordinated naming theme for your machines?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Runner

RFC 1178 - never name a host after a currently-unique service it provides.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It doesn't quite say that, but I think the meaning is essentially the same: "Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine." - RFC 1178

For my homelab, I think that's fine to do. I'm unlikely to have multiple Plex servers locally, for example, and if so, numerically naming them is fine - I provision with Ansible, and if I'm at the point where I'm having sequentially numbered hosts, they'll be configured as cattle anyway. Also, having the names reflect the services a host provides makes it easier to match in my playbooks.

I think it's a better scheme than turning to mythology, fiction, or animal species, which oddly enough RFC 1178 does encourage you to do.

[–] marmarama 3 points 1 year ago

At least for me, there is a big difference between naming things at home and naming things for work.

Work "pet" machines get systematic names based on function, location, ownership and/or serial/asset numbers. There aren't very many of them these days. If they are "cattle" then they get random names, and their build is ephemeral. If they go wrong or need an upgrade, they get rebuilt and their replacement build gets a new random name. Whether they are pets or cattle, the hostnames are secondary to tags and other metadata, and in most cases the tags are used to identify the machines in the first instance, because tags are far more flexible and descriptive than a hostname.

At home, where the number of machines is limited, I know all of them like the back of my hand, and it's mostly just me touching them, whimsical names are where it's at.