RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

I use the wordlist from Oren Tirosh’s mnemonic encoding project: http://web.archive.org/web/20090918202746/http://tothink.com... I can't find the post that linked it, but it had a very nice scheme. EDIT: found it: https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/ EDIT2: one-liner to get a random word from the file: cat wordlist.txt | tail -n +2 | sed -E 's/\s*(\w+)\s+/\1\n/g' | sed -E '/^$/d' | shuf -n 1 i.e. <print file> | <skip first line> | <split lines into words> | <remove empty lines> | <choose random line>

This reminds me of the Pets vs Cattle analogy https://www.engineyard.com/blog/pets-vs-cattle With a pet, you obsess over the name and meaning of the name. With cattle, as long as names don't collide or cause problems, you couldn't care less about the name.

I used to be very into theme names. You know, back in the early '90s when this document was published. Sit down and let me tell you a story of the moment that really put the nail in the theme-based name coffin for me... I used to run a System Admin consulting business. One of our clients had a bunch of systems that were named things like "db" prefix for database servers, "web" for web servers, etc... They hired a…