Hostnames
February 20, 2025
A few days ago, one of my kids asked me why our TV was called Hypnotoad. He was standing next to me when I was changing some settings.
At my first job, the hostnames we used internally, were names of different kinds of trees. I don't know where that idea came from. I worked for microbiologists, but perhaps protein names don't work for host names. Anyway, I quickly learned not to set up a server with names like apebroodboom because it's simply too much to type when ssh'ing into that server.
I forgot what hostname I chose the time I first installed Linux on my PC but I remember reading Douglas Adams' the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when I added a second monitor, so I changed it's hostname to Zaphod. If a PC without a monitor is called headless, one with two monitors surely can be called double-headed, right? It remained the hostname of all my subsequent PCs, even though I now use a single, albeit very wide, screen.
By the time that the number of devices in my household - that I needed to be able to ping or ssh into - grew larger than one, I was watching Futurama, so my server became Bender, and, apart from Zaphod, I stuck with Futurama characters since. I've even made it into a little hobby of mine to select the perfect character names. I decided on Hypnotoad for our living room TV, because of the effect it has on our children, and my Pi-hole is on a RaspberryPI that is approached as Hermes. My Acer Nitro laptop with its red and black theme and flexible cheap plastic casing is called Flexo.
My son is eleven, so I suppose it's about time he knows what a hostname is. I think he's still a bit too young to watch Futurama though.