What's everyone's server naming scheme?
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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Culture ships.
Limiting Factor and Cargo Cult are desktops.
Empiricist and Sense amid Madness, Wit Amdist Folly are a NAS and NUC that runs everything I need
Its a great variety of memorable names.
(And even though Elon keeps naming things after them, he hasn't fucking read the books.)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #211 for this comm, first seen 4th Apr 2026, 18:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
good bot pats head
I name everything after celestial objects. Stars, galaxies, constellations, and nebula are all good sources of names. Not the ones with the random number names, stuff like Andromeda and Sirius
My name scheme is song names. I listen to allot of folk rock, so some names are hollowmoon or foxlore.
Its a little spicier than anas or pnas
I don't have enough machines to have a scheme lol
- My gaming PC/game streaming server is "Orthanc" cause well... It's a computer tower.
- My NAS/Plex/*arr server is "lil-nas-x", cause it's built out of a small form factor NAS
- My personal devices are boringly named "ModelName-ABC", ABC replaced with my actual initials. Same for my wife's and kids' devices.
I used to name systems after Star Trek ships, but switched to Farscape characters ages ago. Now I'm doing more practical names based on function.
At this point I'm just tired of the acronym salad we all tend to deal with at work
"Wait, was I supposed to bounce CDBWINPROD02 or DBCWINPROD02?"
Figured if I had a choice I would use more "human" names that allow the servers to have more of a "personality"
Perse for example has been having an issue with it's bios and it's been spending quite a lot of time in the underworld LOL
God I hate the "stuff as much information into a server name with no separators in all caps" naming conventions...
Amen, feels cold and unimaginative
Home server larping as a real enterprise server.
In a business with tens of thousands of servers, it makes sense to have long complicated names.
For a homelab ? Not really.
In a business with tens of thousands of servers, it makes sense to have long complicated names.
I'm actually not convinced of this approach. It's one of those things that makes perfect logical sense when you say it - but in practice "DBDWWHORCLHHIP01" is just as meaningless as "Hercules". And it's a lot more difficult to say, remember and differentiate from "DBDWWHORCLHHID01". You may as well just use UUIDs at that point.
Humans are really good at associating names with things. It's why people have names. We don't call people "AMCAM601W" for a reason. Even in conversations you don't rattle off the long initialism names of systems - you say "The database".
I think you choose a poor example.
When I say long name I wasn't implying meaningless ones.
Most business with a lot of machines uses long names where everything as a logical meaning.
[Site][service][Rack][User selected 8 chars name]
I mean you dont have to use such obtuse names. But if you have a lot of servers you have to have a long name or you will risk exhausting the available names.
I'm just saying long names dont have to be obtuse or confusing. You can use user selected names as a suffix to a more functional initial prefix. So that people who work this area of the infrastructure can have clear names but at the same time some other sys admin that never worked on it can still know where and who is responsible of the server.
My initial point is just that the namespace and length of hostnames mostly depends on what you want to do. For a homelab you dont need wide namespace. But for a large business using short names wouldn't be practical either.
I think you choose a poor example.
When I say long name I wasn’t implying meaningless ones.
Sooo, that example wasn't exactly "contrived" - it's based on a standard I see where I work.
DB - it's a database!
DW - and a data warehouse at that!
ORCL - It's an Oracle database!
HHI - Application or team using / managing this database
P - Production (T for Test - love the 1 char difference between names!)
01 - There may be more than one.
This is more what I'm arguing against - embedding meta-data about the thing into its name. Especially when all of that information is available in AWS metadata.
[Site][service][Rack] makes sense for on-premise stuff - no argument there.
I’m just saying long names dont have to be obtuse or confusing.
Agree
Not to butt in into your conversation, just wanted to drop that me and my colleagues use what we call the "clone cars" method to combat our company's naming scheme
So for example we dubbed CAPROD01 "Cappy" NASPROD01 became "Nasir" LTPDEV02 became "Luigi" (because he's always number 2)
Of course in written communication we use the full name (which is much less of an inconvenience) and we always double check in conversation or spell out full names before doing anything critical
Hey I'm kinda struggling to get my stuff self hosted. I set proxmox up and now I don't know what to do with it :D. Any suggestions?
Soooo, proxmox is just the base of the ecosystem, it allows you to load a bunch of containers and virtual machines.
If you're not sure what you want yo host check this page out.
https://www.turnkeylinux.org/lxc
They have a bunch of container templates that are ready to host.
I've been trying to replace could services with self hosted ones for me and my loved ones; these are some of my favorites:
- Nextcloud: replaces onedrive and dropbox
- Pangolin: Replaces Cloudflared (a little technical)
- Jellifin: Locally hosted netflix clone
- Game server: Awesome multi game server host, I use it to play minecraft with my nephews, has a ton of games you can host
- Joomla: (or any other CMS) when you mix it with Pangolin, it's an easy way to host a website
- Netbird: overlay network manager that allows you to join multiple sites/networks as one LAN, it's great for off site backups and to play with friends and family without having to host anything
- Grafana: Monitoring, data analytics and alerts. It's like task manager but a thousand times better.
- Yunohost: It's a one click install user friendly interface to manage web apps.
Wasn't there some drama recently about Turnkey? I vaguely remember some kind of kerfuffle.
Haven't heard the gossip, please pray tell.
I may be hallucinating. It's kind of hard to keep up with everything sometimes. I'll see if I can dig up something. I wasn't throwing shade on your suggestion, or trying to inject doubt. It just triggered a light in my brain, but unfortunately, my brain has no recollection except that there was something. Thanks pos brain!
Proxmox helper scripts! These help a lot.
+1 for the helper scripts
P.s. Vault warden is an EXCELLENT self hosted password manager, highly recommend that as well.
P.P.S Do not make a self-hosted password manager your first project. You should expect one of these first projects to absolutely eat shit for reasons you don't fully understand yet, and having it be your daily-driver password manager would be a hell of a shitty weekend.
Very good advice, also backup daily and test for backups often !!!!
I name mine after greek and roman gods.
My NAS is bamed Hestia, the goddess of the bearth and home.
My docker server is called Poseidon due to the sea iconography of docker. My second iteration of my docker server where I tried playing around with podman I called Neptune.
I briefly had a Raspberry Pi for experimenting with some stuff which was called Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth.
My Proxmox machine on which pretty much all ky other servers are run as VMs is called Atlas, as the Titan holding up my personal network.
I also have a truenas VM which I boringly called truenas...
I'm boring. I'll name physical hardware after the model name or manufacturer or something like that. My main host is just named "DellPVE" and then I'll name VM/containers after the service it's running, "radarr", "plex", "pihole" etc.
You know Dasher, and Dancer, and Prancer, and Vixen. Comet, and Cupid, and Donner, and Blitzen........
Is there a guide to set something like this up? I have jellyfin on Ubuntu server and I'd very much like to get something that's got an interface I can understand.
Man I wish I spent time actually learning Proxmox, instead dumped everything into a headless Debian VM and called it a day.
I mean, you can always install Proxmox on Debian XD
or for that matter LXD ... it's all kinda the same.
Gotta love OSS
That's AWESOME, I also named my NAS Atlas ... because it carries the weight of all my backups
Good call on those names, you're giving me some pretty cool ideas for my next servers
I named a lot of my machines hackbox...
I went with a SciFi ship theme, my main server is VMS-HORIZON (Virtual Machine Ship). The VMs have ship component names like AUDIO-CORE (navidrome) and VISUAL-CORE (Immich).
My Raspberry Pi is named ORBITER, like a orbiting shuttle/satellite, and the VM it has is called BEACON (for Gotify)
Close, LCC. I do have a portrainer instance for docker images, but I like the extra control that San lxc gives you
Mine is Final Fantasy summon monsters!
Elements of the periodic table.
So what happens when you cluster Na with H20?
Nice.
There are a ton of guides out there, but the problem with open source software is that you can make it as yours as you want so every deployment is different. You would be better off doing some googling on what you want to get to, and asking more specific questions. Everyone in the community loves to help, but we need to know how.
Heads up. I think you meant to reply but made a new comment.