Names and Hostnames

Hostname themes, and plugging my recent open source contribution.

When I first started using github, I thought the automatic repository name generator was pretty cool. From start to finish, my master’s thesis lived under the codename verbose-adventure. The importance of a good name, for a person, a project, or a server, shouldn’t be underestimated.

A little later, I once wrote codename_generator.py: a tiny python script that walked any text and pulled out every adjective+noun pair. Running it on the Bible got me pages of weirdly evocative options like promised land, golden calf, burning bush, forbidden fruit.

My home-server cluster ended up with a nautical theme. Half-blame The Count of Monte Cristo: I keep starting it, getting hooked on the first half, and bouncing off the revenge plot.

• phantom-ship and sunken-ship: two old laptops where this all started
• distant-shore and foreign-port: two newer laptops
• rusty-anchor: a pre-Intel iMac
• vps-relay: the boring outlier, a Hetzner box

When I switched to clan.lol to manage all three from a single dotfiles repo, the tooling didn’t support hyphens in machine names. My (largely vibe-coded) PR added hyphen support: clan-community#25.

Naming is the first interface anyone, including a machine, has to a thing.