Ask HN: Which hostnames do you choose for your PCs?

Back in the very early 90&#x27;s, I ran a small ISP that fed UUCP news and email to BBS systems. As it grew, I had 3 servers. Toronto, where I live, has 3 major rivers, so the servers were named Humber, Rouge and Don.<p>My Raspberry Pis (of which I have quite a few) have patterned names. One set of them, for example are &#x27;evil&#x27; names. EvilEye does monitoring stuff, EvilMind is the main host of a clusterHAT cluster, EvilGenius has a lot of my Lisp programming stuff on it, and so on. Since I don&#x27;t purposely access the nodes on the pi cluster except to update them, I just give them boring host1 to host4 names.<p>As for laptops, I&#x27;m boring. My laptop is ksaj-laptop, my SO&#x27;s is similarly named, and my old one that I rarely use anymore is crappylappy.

I&#x27;ve always used the Solar System as a source of names. Planet names for the main machines, with the names of moons for lesser devices like printers and scanners. The router and connection to the internet is called &quot;Sun&quot;, of course.

Periodic table. Rare gases for mobile devices. Metals for &quot;non-mobile&quot; devices. Most everything else is just random across the table, some of my preferred devices get &quot;special&quot; names like fantasy metals.

Some suggestions:<p>Greek gods &#x2F; Roman gods &#x2F; Other gods &#x2F; Characters from the chronicles of Narnia &#x2F; Characters from Marvel or DC &#x2F; Characters from Donald Duck &#x2F; Animal species &#x2F; Plant species &#x2F; Musical genres (e.g. electronic music)<p>Good luck :D

I&#x27;ve adopted a naming scheme after Pokemon. My main rig is called Raichu, whilst one of my dedicated servers is called Onix.<p>The main reasoning behind it was to ensure a large pool of names without having to reuse any from past machines.

Cities. There are lots of short, memorable city names. And they don&#x27;t get old. (Fictional characters or band names tend to get tiresome after a while.)

My home network is *.fishnet, all hostnames are fish, laptops are flat fish; I type this on flounder.fishnet ...