newbiesforever

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Wasn't sure, but I thought you might be illustrating my alleged absurdity by being absurd (i.e., refusing to name your hypothetical kids). My mistake. Well, if you had been, I would not have been offended.

I'm not saying this about George Carlin's material in general, but that particular joke was mean-spirited and not funny. What a jerk.

smeezekitty

int creepyness = max_creepy << 8;
while(STILL_ISNT_WIERD_ENOUGH){
creepyness++;
}

easuter

Yay for negative creepiness!

SaintDanBert

If I manage to crack your network, thank you for advertising which hosts on your lan I should target "admin" "money" "payroll" "orders" and such. Even if your hosts have nothing of real value to lose, the name alone makes them a target. The same is true if your network is in several locations -- "austin" "memphis" "altus" "lompoc" -- crackers now know where they are once they break in.

Use nonsense names that offer no clue to where a host is or what role it plays in your organization. A little obscurity goes a long way.

~~~ 0;-Dan

H_TeXMeX_H

Well, just for the heck of it, I do use user names and host names, but that's because I have to. Usually something like demonslayer, thor, beowulf, grendel, dragonslayer, terminator, eviscerator. One day, I hope those names will be appropriate ... the computers will become a sentient cluster, realize their purpose, and fulfill it !!! muhahahah !!!

sadiqdm

Whether you need to name your computers should depend on how many you have. Naming a network, and it's components has two advantages. It makes it easier to set-up connections, and it makes it easier to keep an asset register. I have two desktops and a laptop at home, and 4 desktops and file server at work, so they are all named. At home I currently use characters from The Magic Roundabout, and at work characters from Star Trek (the original). The Magic Roundabout only ever had a few characters, so that is OK for home, but if I need to I have several series worth of Star Trek to work through at work!

Names also make it easy to identify a machine when providing telephone support. Many year ago I worked for Granada Television, and they had over 4 thousand desktops across about 10 sites. They were all named by building name and a number, so tech support could identify where in the network you were.

catkin

I tried meaningful names and naming schemes related to role, physical location, user, hardware, OS etc. and all of those cunning schemes have broken down at some point -- when a workstation becomes a server, when an OS is changed, when the user leaves the company, when an old workstation or server is retired to work as a network device, when hardware is changed ... so "meaningful" is out.

That leaves the arbitrary like star names, Shakespeare characters etc. which are fine for SOHO and maybe even SME setups but sure aren't scalable to corporate! And a name which is completely unrelated to the object it is attached to doesn't feel right.

There is nothing unique about a computer, no unchanging ID like a serial number. It's the "asset tag" problem -- what exactly is the asset given that any part of a computer can be replaced or reused? Like the 800 year old broom at The Tower of London; sure, it's 800 years old and has had 20 new handles and 40 changes of bristles in that time.

Right now I'm using CW8 which is easy to type, dissimilar from other names in the namespace and signifies Charles' Workstation the 8th.

rsciw

Different name specs for different boxes

Windows stationary boxes usually something in relation with Blood.
Previous Win box was called "BloodRayne" (from the game...), current box is called "Bloodlines" (mainly from Vampire tM - Bloodlines).

Laptop, no matter which OS, is called "Lambdashuttle" (Star Wars shuttle).

Debian stationary box is called "Section 9" (Ghost in the Shell).

Every other Unix/Linux type machine will be named with Section9_xyz, so the openBSD (inactive however) box is called
Section9_Conduit (as it was planned that all traffic will go through that box first).

All my VMs are named S9<distro>, e.g. S9OpenBSD, S9Fedora, etc...

I also refer to them by name when I speak about them. So instead of saying "I have that on my debian box..." I say "I have that on Section9" (that is, to people who know what I mean )

Section9 is the latest naming or "namespace" I introduced to my machines. It shall at some point be referred to my complete network as well as my codebase for my projects.
Even went so far to register http://section-nine.org

smeezekitty

well it depends on the size of creepyness.

esteeven

I am not sure that you read my post correctly before you gave me a lesson in security.

I know which machine is which.
I didn't say you would know.

druuna

I have to agree with you on that one :-)

But I do name my machines and with a double lan setup you get this:

And: Yes, I do love Magic the Gathering........

smeezekitty

the network names for my computers are
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc (yes i have 14)

/dev/me

I name my machines on my network (I have several physical and several virtual machines on my home network) with either a verb or a noun suffixed with an indication of their OS.

The joke of course is that the suffix 'nix' sounds very much like the Dutch word for 'nothing' (niks). So one of my machines is called 'wilnix' which means 'wants nothing' and another 'spoednix' means 'hurries nothing'.

Theoretically any Windows PC's would be suffixed with 'win' as this means 'to win' in Dutch like it does in English. I can imagine a PC in my house getting the name 'overwin' (conquer) but seeing as I don't have a valid Redmond license (apart from a W98SE OEM license) this ingenious method of naming my network nodes remains only a theory.

PatrickMay16

I don't give my computers proper 'names', but I do make sure that the hostname is something simple and easier to remember. Here are the hostnames I use:

patrick (this is my main computer)
z35fm (this is my laptop. I'm using the model number of the laptop as the hostname)
eee900 (this is my EeePC. Heh heh! Oh, man! DENIS. DENNIS.)
opteron175 (this is the hostname of the installation of Debian that I put on the family computer. Sadly, it isn't booted a lot these days because my family prefer windows. Anyway, this hostname refers to the processor which is installed in this computer)

newbiesforever

There are two patterns of naming behavior here, and mine (giving the computers non-practical names) is clearly the minority.