Selfhosted

I name my devices after greek gods based on what I'm going in life at the time or after what their purpose is.

I named my first gaming PC "Poseidon" when I was doing ship related work. Now it's my server.

My gaming PC is "Asclepius", the Greek god of healing. Built when I got into healthcare.

Hermes, god of messeges, is my lil pi that helps with routing (pihole, pivpn, nginx).

My HTPC is Dionysus, Greek god of wine and parties.

My thinkpad is Persephone cus it looks good but doesn't do much. I might rename it.

The services that I run on these are just named "device-service" e.g. hermes-nginx

MacBook Pro: mbp.domain.com
Raspberry Pi 2: rpi2.domain.com
Raspberry Pi 3: rpi3.domain.com
Raspberry Pi 4: rpi4.domain.com
Raspberry Pi 5: rpi5.domain.com
(Yes, I have one of each.)
Synology DS415+: ds415.domain.com
Phone: iphone.domain.com
Watch: watch.domain.com
AppleTV: appletv.domain.com
Nintendo Switch: switch.domain.com

Fedora is called fed. Ubuntu is ubu. Laptop is laptop 🌝

I went with alpha, beta, gamma ...

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.

Physical machines (except my gaming PC) get Ratchet & Clank character names, and matching labels to go with it. My trusty sidekick Thinkpad T14 G1 is named "Clank". It runs LMDE.

VMs and LXCs get actually-descriptive names, since those are what run my services.

Gaming PC is called "Dagny"; it's a Scandinavian name for "a new day", since that PC was a gift to myself after my divorce. It's currently the only Windows machine in my house now.

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.

Desktop: Octiron
Laptop: Octogen
Phone: Octarine

• Omnigon: refers to my network and server overall
• Terragon: Utility desktop
• Pyrogon: Gaming desktop
• Aquagon: Laptop
• Aerogon: Phone
• Sonogon: RPi sound server
• Minigon: Cyberdeck

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

Depends on how many hostnames I need. If I just need 2, using opposite duals is fun, {romeo,ruliet}.shakespeare.com. 4 I almost always use cardinal directions or the seasons; {north,south,east,west}.domain.com or {spring,summer,fall,winter}.domain.com.

If I need a lot of potential subdomains, you can't beat the Greek or NATO alphabet, giving you 24 and 26 hostnames respectively which can be further enhanced by using the purpose of the server with the alphabet;

• beta-w02.domain.com # second webserver on beta
• beta-db02.domain.com # second db on beta

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 select hostnames drawn from the ordinal numerals of whatever language I happen to be trying to learn. Recently, it was Japanese so the first host was named "ichiro", the second as "jiro", the third as "saburo".

Those are the romanized spellings of the original kanji characters: 一郎, 二郎, and 三郎. These aren't the ordinal numbers per-se (eg first, second, third) but are an old way of assigning given names to male children. They literally mean "first son", "second son", "third son".

Previously, I did French ordinal numbers, and the benefit of naming this way is that I can enumerate a countably infinite number of hosts lol

Desktop: HAL9000

laptop: HALjr

Phone: HALnano

Then HALserver, HALprinter (octoprint), HALhome (home assistant) and so on... Big fan of Stanley Kubrick haha

Tried to get the hal9.ooo domain name but it was taken...

Usually, some type of pun based on the hardware.

Charybdis, hippo, appa, Momo, pabu

Internal server (Home Assistant etc.): domus
External server (Nextcloud etc.): nimbus
Router/firewall: murus

I call them after what service is running on it. E.g. openvpn.

I do marvel weapons/artifacts:

Phone: Mjolnir

Tablet: Stormbreaker

Laptop: Darkhold

Earbuds: I.C.E.R

Backup NAS: EyeOfAgamotto

Etc, etc 😅

Desktop: 30p87
Laptop: 30p87-laptop
Phone: 30p87-phone
Server: 30p87-server
DNS server at location bv: 30p87-dns-bv
DNS server at location db: 30p87-dns-db

@Krik For my personal devices, i use the names of the 12 Colonies of Kobol from Battlestar Galactica. So I currently have 2 laptops: Aerilon and Caprica. When I get a new phone, I'll probably name it Scorpia or Tauron.

Choosing a good naming scheme depends on how many you need, and how often you add to your collection.

If you need some inspiration, check out this list. https://namingschemes.com/Main/_Page

I name based on OS and location.

fedoraDesktop fedoraLaptop fedoraServer fedoraSchoolServer unraid qnap ubuntuServer

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.

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)

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.

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.

Ubiquitous and Tiamat are my servers, Polyglotal for my home assistant voice endpoint, and some more. Points for the reference

My media server is called "The_Nexus."

My phone when I host anything on it is "The Hackinator 9000" because I think it would be funny for a normie to see and freak out.

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 😄

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.