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

There is actually an RFC (1178) regarding best practice in naming computers.

The following is discouraged by this RFC:

• Don't overload other terms already in common use.
• Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine.
• Don't use your own name.
• Don't use long names.
• Avoid alternate spellings.
• Avoid domain names
• Don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names
• Don't use digits at the beginning of the name.
• Don't use non-alphanumeric characters in a name
• Don't expect case to be preserved

Guidence for naming given by this RFC is:

• Use words/names that are rarely used
• Use theme names
• Use real words

And as always "There is always room for an exception"

Answer 2

In a large corporation we use the following scheme for non server computers. city abbreviation, employee number, d or l depending on weather it's a desktop or laptop, then a sequential number starting at one that increases for each computer the employee has. For example if your number 238 in the hr system and work in Minneapolis and have three computers in your name, two desktops and a laptop your names would be as follows. mn238d1 mn238d2 mn238l1

Answer 3

Two references:

• http://www.namingschemes.com/Main_Page

• RFC1178.

Answer 4

I've seen Disney characters in one organization and porn stars in another.

Seems that few wanted to fess up to recognizing both sets.

Answer 5

I prefer using Simpsons characters, because:

1. There are so many of them
2. Most people -- and definitely many IT staff -- know the Simpsons
3. The characters are so distinct that we can choose a character that's close to the server's function, as a way of remembering what does what
4. It's a good way to endear our staff to the servers

Answer 6

1.) Most fun naming convention for me, mathematicians and physicists. The list of notable ones is almost endless and they're pretty distinctive, "Dirac", "Fermi", "Pauli", "Feynman", etc.

2.) Here's one that might work for you:

First character: W, S or L, (Workstation, Server or Laptop) Second string: office/branch accounting code such as 047, 130, 227, etc. Third string: OS designator, (RHL, SUN, XP, VI, 2K, 2K3) Fourth: (here's where it splits and gets weird.) If it's a server, then a VERY short purpose code. (For application servers: "app01", etc. DNS, mail, file, etc. If it's a workstation, then put in the last four digits of the user's extension.

So we've got:

Sun Solaris application server, located in Dillion, Colorado which uses the office accounting code "244":

s244sunapp01

Windows XP laptop, assigned to marketing personnel located in Anchorage, AL (office code 047) at extension x4556:

L047xp4556

Windows 2003 domain controller, located in Bellingham, WA (office code 012):

s0122k3dc01

...and so on, and so on.

Worst naming convention I ever saw used was truncating the username in a workstation name, which led to ALL SORTS of weirdness.

Answer 7

The most useless convention is the one where you let the users set their own machine name. Avoid that at all cost.

I typically use either types or brands of beer. Types if you know your machine population will remain fairly small (one or two dozen); brands if it will be large. Many users (mainly guys) get a kick out of it, because it allows them to sort of "root for" their favorite.

The two main problems with the beer branding scheme are a) what to do with multi-word names and b) how to deal with really long names.

Answer 8

I came up with the following system when we had a mix of manufacturers of our PCs:

e.g. Dell-0906-01

• Dell is the manufacturer
• 0906 is 2009-06 which is the month the PC was bought or set up
• 01 is a serial number for all PCs set up that month. So we might have Dell-0906-01 and then HP-0906-02, then IBM-0906-03

Compaq was the longest manufacturer's name, so this fit within the 15 character netbios limit. This convention wouldn't work if you had more than 99 PCs in a given month, but that wasn't a concern for us.

For us, manufacturer and date would tell us a lot about the hardware, and in general the date would tell us quickly how old a system was.

We never liked naming PCs based on who used because of the need to rename them. This convention avoided that hassle. In practice, we grouped our PC purchases and did things like "all the secretaries are getting PCs in this batch" or "all the managers are getting new laptops" so it was also easy to associate a name with a "type" of PC user.

Later, we dropped the manufacturer and used an abbreviation for which division and what location the PC was in, but that required too much abbreviation to be as meaningful, we had things like: wpvaws-0906-01, frvaws- ppvaws- wpqcws- wpotws- (ws for WorkStation) It still worked, but wasn't as readable.

Answer 9

Fixed Workstations

I have always named workstations based upon their location, we have five buildings each with their own code (C - Cashman, N - Newman, M - St. Marys, L - Lutwyche and SC - Sacre Coeur) each building has multiple floors (B - Basement, G - Ground, F - First, S - Second, A - Attic) and each room has a number. So rooms are named NF7, MG6, CS1. Our naming scheme simply adds a dash ("-") followed by a sequential number for that room - NF7-01, MG6-01, etc. Some computers are connected to SMARTboards so these get called -SMART instead of the sequential number as they have special policies applied.

The advantage of this system means we can identify the probable name of a computer with very little information (i.e. it was reported by Mrs Jones at 12:45 - at this point Mrs Jones was timetabled in CS1, so it is probably CS1-SMART. A student had a problem in NF7 at 10:17 which means they will be using one of the computers in NF7-01 through NF7-17). It is easy for new staff to follow the naming scheme as they can just look at the site maps.

Laptops

We have had a couple of systems for laptops, although the one that has worked best is naming them by generation, so the first batch of Acer laptops that were bought were LTA1, the second batch of Acers were LTA2 and the first batch of Fijitsu-Siemens were LTF1. Again an sequential number is appended to the name to give us LTA1-01, LTA1-02, LTF1-01, etc.

We can easily identify which laptops are of which generation simply from their DNS name, because we use BGInfo to display the computer name on the background we can ask anyone with a laptop named LTA1 to return it to be replaced (I have toyed with doing this programaticly to display a message on the login screens).

Answer 10

I usually call them George. Get's rough after a while, but keeps the mind focused.

Answer 11

There is a tradition in my family where each son must me named with the first letter being the next letter in the alphabet from the previous baby to be born anywhere in the tree. EX( if Albert was born last month, and i have a child it would need to be named with something starting with B, like Bob) and there can't be a repetition(if theres a bob alive, i would not be able to name my child Bob).

So, 3 summers ago my aunt was about to have a child and her only options(that she liked) where Sergio and "Saturnino" (yea, saturnino). So... I of course give tech support for all the extended family like most of us and decided to start naming all computers "Saturnino" and some variant, like if it was a fujitsu "Saturnino Ninja" or a mac "SaturninoBook". After a couple of months i heard that my aunt decided to name my cousin "Sergio" because saturnino was being used all over the family as a synonym of computer. Still every computer in my family is a variant of Saturnino

Answer 12

Majority of our host names were taken from Greek Mythology.

• Minotaur
• Zeus
• Athena
• Calypso

and more.

Answer 13

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 14

In a very small shop years ago (free standing servers)

The domain controller is always right. So it was called "Right"

It's sister (web and SQL) was therefore "Left"

The later 3rd server (running custom emulator software) was under a different desk and was called "Middle"

Sad, pointless, amusing.

Answer 15

We use North American towns and cities.

Answer 16

FirstName-PC for desktops or FirstName-NB for laptops.

Works well when you have only a dozen people in the office who consistently use the same computer.

When I was government tech support we'd use FirstInitialLastName-PC/NB. The worst was when we tried naming the computers after the specific tasks usually performed on them. We ended up with Development1 through Development20.

Answer 17

"wks-$Username" seen that in use, AND gets around the unique-name feature of AD. Works well for environments that image PCs before giving them to new employees.

Answer 18

Names of mountains. At my old job we used the names of Norwegian mountains. (We're in Norway...)

I don't see a similar scheme working too well for the danish or dutch, though...

Answer 19

I name systems after menu items from the local pseudo-Chinese fast food chicken outlet. "hotandspicy" "penangcurry" "lemon" and so on. Everyone in the office eats there, so it's only 'useless' to people who don't get to eat good pseudo-Chinese fast food chicken.

Answer 20

We use PC001, PC002 and so on. Simple not so funny but useful ;-)

Answer 21

We also use Roman gods for our various remote boxes. However, as we are a multinational, we use [office designation]-[username] or [office designation]-[department][4 digit number] for workstations, e.g. syd1-jeremys or syd1-dev8209.

We're moving more to the username side now as it's assured they will be unique, and it helps with administration when a particular user needs assistance and remote control is sufficient to solve the issue. Plus, we rebuild each machine if a user leaves the company, so using the username makes more sense. The only downside there is for short-term contractors, who tend to leave and be replaced with rather alarming frequency such that it's not always practical to rebuild their machine before their replacement arrives.

Ehtyar.

Answer 22

There was a place that I was at for a short time that used ship names as their naming convention. The most notable was what they used for their PDC: Titanic

Talk about preparing for disaster... Now you know why I left...

-JFV

Answer 23

i remember at university one of the lab computers was called 'moron' i guess they must have run out ideas by that stage. (or it was named after one of the lecturers)

my only recomendation is to keep it short, so that there is less chance of a typo when accessing it, and it is easy to spell over the phone

Answer 24

We have several naming schemes. Workstations are named after biscuits (oreo, hobnob, timtam, digestive), office servers are named after alcoholic drinks (pimms, vodka, gin) and our datacentre servers are named after London Underground stations (victoria, cockfosters, paddington) (with the exception of servers in large clusters where it became difficult to remember who was in what cluster, which are named the exciting w000, w001, w002 etc).

Answer 25

Our servers are sub-domained and named after members of the Wu-Tang Clan:

ins.wu.domain.com - Inspectah Deck mk.wu.domain.com - Masta Killah chef.wu.domain.com - Raekwon the Chef

and since there are only 9 members, when we need to expand, we'll use members of the larger Killa Beez klan and sub-domain them like:

name.kb.domain.com

So far we haven't reached that point, but it is a lot of fun talking about our servers when clients are present.

Answer 26

We're boring here... salesdell1, for example :( Still - avoid giving names that are person or location specific. Job specific ones like my example are bad enough - becomes confusing when you move them. Something vaguely descriptive is handy so you can match the physical to the logical with a mnemonic.

Having said that, my home network is "things you might find on a beach" - firewall is sandcastle, and then I have breakwater, bucket and spade.

Used to be named after "cheeses unsuitable for grilling" - eg. "gouda", "mascarpone" :)

Answer 27

We're boring by comparison: primary location, secondary location and asset tag number.

Still at least we don't have to ask users to try find their PC name if we ever need to remotely control them.

At home I use hillbilly names (it amuses me): Billy-Bob, John-Boy, Jethro, and so on.

Answer 28

Simpson's names,

• Macro : ldap
• Pinchy : IDS
• Zutroy : dev server
• Wiggum : firewall
• Grabowski : firewall2
• Apu : DHCP

and so on :)

You can find the cast list here

But for "clusters" we use names like:

• web01, web02, web03
• mx1, mx2, mx3
• compute-0-0, compute-1-1, compute-2-30 (the first number is the rack)
  • Shortened c-0-0, c-1-1, c-2-30

Answer 29

Ours uses a variation of the Reverse Polish Notation coupled with a number. For example, ws000020 is the twentieth windows server, wv stands for a windows virtual machine, wl is a windows laptop and so on. Unfortunately, it's quite hard to remember what wv009472 was for unless you work with it daily.

On customer networks, the servers are prefixed by role. For example, there's www1 and www2 as well as sql1 and sql2. The servers for a specific application are kept on a separate domain (for example, intra.initech.example), so the fully qualified domain name tells exactly what the server is for. Of course, all of this is abstracted away from end-users with load balancers, so that they only see intra.initech.example.

At home, I use theme naming. For example, I have zathras, lyta, garibaldi, lennier and natoth. :-)

Answer 30

At work, systems are named after the user who uses it, prefixed with "D-" for desktop systems and "L-" for laptops. Testsystems are prefixed with "T-" plus the name of the project that they mostly used for. The servers have more boring names, though.

At home, I give my computers a woman's name. I started with the letter A for my first computer and am now up to Petra with my latest netbook. I have a small problem when I want to buy a new computer, since I don't like most names that start with a Q. :-)

Answer 31

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 32

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 33

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 34

I'd call 'm HAL or DeepThought

Answer 35

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 36

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

Answer 37

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 38

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 39

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

Answer 40

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

Answer 41

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 42

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

Answer 43

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 44

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 45

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 46

The servers for the local church I named:

• Lucifer
• Alfheim
• Valkyrie
• Hel

My personal computers are:

• Loki
• Walfdar
• Freya

Answer 47

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

Answer 48

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 49

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.