Naming convention for PC in a network

Question

I worked for a company that named the pc's after roman gods (zeus, mars...). That was quiet funny while there where only 5 pc's on the network, but after changing the pc's several times I didn't remember my pc name. What naming convention do you use or what was the most useless naming convention you ever used?

Answer 1

Manufacturer - Serial Number. Uniquely connectable to hardware and never needs to be changed.

LENOVO-1234ABC for example. Hardware servers follow the same path - FS-12345ABCDE or IBM-1234ABC. Virtual ones are different. VM - Purpose - Number in farm. VM-MSSQL-6 or VM-ADDC-3.

Answer 2

I mostly use names from a set of names.

Examples:

• Characters from animated series (Simpsons, American Dad, Family Guy)
• Names of real stars (Sol, Arktur, Maia, Bellatrix, Deneb, ...)
• Names of (semi-)fictious Star Trek planets (Chronos, Vulcan, Risa, Bajor, ...)

Sometimes when I can't think of a good set I use Google Sets.

Answer 3

For PCs, we use our company name, followed by the number from the asset tag. Simple, predictable, and makes it much easier for any remote user to tell you which machine they're on.

Answer 4

I'd call 'm HAL or DeepThought

Answer 5

Our servers are named by physical location first (we have thousands of servers and loads of datacentres) then an underscore and their function, as that often changes.

For instance 44lntmc09a07_wlo11 (uk,london,datacentre,rack,blade enclose,slot_weblogic on OEL server 11).

This way we always know where our servers are but have a 'temporary' short name for it's function.

Answer 6

Anime ships/mecha (yamato, swordfishII, eva, RX-75 Guntank, etc..)

Answer 7

We used to name computers after lochs, but I ran out of names of lochs. I then started naming them after the service tags (we use exclusively Dell machines) but that got silly quickly.

We now name them with the company initials and abrief description of the machine, such as

• csphyshost01 as a virtualserver host
• csvm01 as a virtual server instnace
• csdev01 as a development machine
• csman01 as a management machine
• cssales01 as a sales machine

The only thing is that it's not very friendly!

Answer 8

we use the name of the room + cpu identifier + number that identifies the cpu (p if is pentium-intel; k if is k7-amd)

so

for example

accounting-p1 accounting-p3 accounting-p4

in this case i skipped p2 because accounting-p1 is a pentium 133mhz; while accounting-p3 is a pentium3 733mhz; accounting-p4 is a pentium4 3.06 ghz naming computers is funny

Answer 9

On a Mac lan, I have seen names from the Matrix trilogy funny

Answer 10

One word game names, e.g. unreal, doom, arkanoid, etc.

Answer 11

In our decentralized environment full of many servers, we use the following rule for servers: DDCCLo1Lo2Apxx

where

• DD is the domain (we use 2 or 3 digits domain names, like B1)
• CC: 2 characters ISO Country code (BE for Belgium, US for USA ...)
• Lo1: 3 letters for city location (par for Paris)
• Lo2: 3 letters for a street or area names (when we have several sites in the same city)
• Ap: 2 letters describing the main purpose of the server (SP for SharePoint, FS for FileSystem, DC for Domain Controller)
• xx: 2 digits from 01 to 99, incrementing.

That system allows us to know where the servers are located from their name.

Answer 12

Servers: Drug names (cocaine, lsd, thc etc.) - just for fun
Terminals: Wild animals
Admin terminals: As every admin pleases.

Answer 13

At work, we have 3 parts convention...

• location or building (adm, asi)
• area abbreviation (urg, sis, con, gin)
• Sequence for the area

So the names are like this

• adm-sis-001
• adm-con-006
• asi-gin-007

We are currently trying to get the type of machine into the name (like, virtual PC, virtual Host, DHCP server, etc)

At home, I was used to use mythological greek names also (Zeus, Pegaso, Poseidon) But now i'm trying to use names from movie characters starting with some letter

• S= Server, (Seth, Saturn, ...)
• P= Portable PC[Laptop] (Perseo, Poseidon, Pegaso, ...)

Answer 14

I've used everything from Greek & Roman Mythology, Planets, Superheroes, and recently the Battlestar Galactica Phonetic Alphabet. I figure I'm mostly the one who is going to be looking at these, so I might as well have a little fun with it. Also, I don't like to name the hardware based on a specific employee because we move hardware around sometimes and/or employee turnover.

Some examples: Athena, Hercules, Jove, Jupiter, Mystique, Neptune, Poseidon, Punisher, Rogue, Sedna, Zulu

Answer 15

My wife and I are birdwatchers, so I name our computers after birds. I usually dig through my pictures directory, and pick one I can use as my screen background. For example, I recently took a great picture of a bald eagle, so my new Mac is "EAGLE".

Oh, and our router is named "AVIARY" of course.

Answer 16

The servers for the local church I named:

• Lucifer
• Alfheim
• Valkyrie
• Hel

My personal computers are:

• Loki
• Walfdar
• Freya

Answer 17

We use exercise terminology. Keeps hackers (most of whom are allergic to exercise) from poking around.

Answer 18

Workstations? alpha code for operating system followed by asset tag

So OSX4901 is the apple laptop on my desk with the asset tag number "4901" in our database XP4973 and WS4973 refer to one desktop machine (also on my desk as it happens), running a different operating system (XP and Windows 7).

Having this appear as the machine name in any event logs, as well as being physically tagged on the machine makes it easy for the helpdesk to know what asset someone is talking about when booking a call and for us to track things down in the systems admin/engineering department when we're reviewing a long and sorry traffic log of some random workstation banging out nonsense on its local subnet.

Asset tag is linked to physical location and/or "owner" in the helpdesk DB too. The moment we get a machine name we then can easily get a "full service history" of the computer from both a network/software point of view and a hardware / repair history point of view. Anything that makes it easier to put that information into the hands of anyone on the IT team who needs it has to be a good thing right?

Answer 19

We use the asset tags as computer names, which makes the audits (using TrackIt!) a little easier to explain to nonIT staff.

One little caveat- on Windows XP machines, we make sure and put a meaningful entry like "Joe Schmo BLDG Room 111" in the "Computer Description" field under the Computer Name tab in System Properties. When our antivirus console starts complaining that ASSET155 has a virus, the computer description will (if we remembered to) tell us where the PC is.