There’s a great Slashdot article on host naming schemes today. It talks about the struggle of smart people who want to give their machines useful and fun names based on consistant naming schemes such as Soviet leaders (Leonid, Yuri, etc.) or French Wines (Pauillac, Pomerol, etc.) versus stupid managment types who want to give them meaningless and confusing names like xyzibm34211, xyzspc25502. It’s loads of fun to read about all the crazy naming systems people have come up with. And I’d never realized there were any RFC’s on creating host naming systems but there are two. RFC1178 gives a lot of useful and interesting guidelines for creating a naming system and RFC2100 is, well, worth reading anyway.

The host names at NCC are all creatures from Science Fiction. Triffid, Horta, Nimon, Rodan, Mothra, Vorta, Ferengi, Krynoid, Vorlon, Zanti, and Wirrin so far with more to come. Eventually we hope to give each host a web page of it’s own explaining the origin of the name. We only have a couple of them up so far as you can see from the links above but more will go up as time allows.

The one problem at NCC is that Randy still names all of his machines wrr[something] – in violation of multiple provisions of RFC1178 it seems. Maybe he’ll read the article and become enlightened.