Most hostname schemes come from the army or the office: command, master, node-01. I wanted my machines named the way a garden works, by the job each one does, with nobody in charge of anybody.
Names are small, but they shape how we think about the things they name. Computing has a long habit of borrowing the language of hierarchy and control: master and slave, command and control, kill, execute, daemon. Many projects have spent the last few years quietly replacing the worst of it with plainer words like primary and replica. That’s a good start. But a small network of reused machines sharing power from the same panels isn’t a chain of command at all. It’s closer to a garden, where every living thing has a job and none of them is in charge.
The names
- pollinator carries what’s needed from one place to another
- forager goes out and brings things back
- decomposer breaks down the old into something useful
- aerator opens up space so air and water can move
- predator keeps the pests in check
- weaver builds the connecting structure
- burrower works underground, out of sight
- composter turns waste into soil
- gleaner collects what others left behind
- scavenger makes use of what nobody wants
Each one describes a role in a healthy ecosystem, and each one maps onto a role a machine might play. A pollinator moves things between places, like a gateway passing messages between radios. A decomposer breaks old things down into useful parts, like a box that archives and prunes old files. A predator keeps pests in check, which is exactly what a firewall or an ad-blocking DNS server does. None of these jobs is more important than the others, and a garden missing any of them starts to go wrong.
Why job names and not themes
There’s an old and good piece of advice on naming computers, RFC 1178, written by Don Libes in 1990. It recommends short, easy-to-spell names, ideally drawn from a consistent theme, and warns against names that describe a machine’s hardware or location, because those change and the name doesn’t. Planets, rivers and characters from a favourite book are the classic themes.
Job names break one of those rules on purpose. They describe what a machine does, and jobs can move. But on a small network built from reused parts, the job is the thing worth remembering. If the gateway dies and another board takes over, the new one becomes the pollinator. The name stays with the role, and the role is what the rest of the network depends on. That fits the buddy system in the three projects, where every device has a partner that can step in for it.
What got left out
I tried suffix schemes too (mainhub, mobilenode) and set them aside. Command was the first word to go. It’s a word about domination, and a few small machines sharing power from the same panels aren’t that.
Which machine is which
Not settled yet. A gateway that passes messages between radios sounds like a pollinator. A box that archives and prunes old files sounds like a decomposer. The names go on as the machines get set up.
Name your own
If you want to borrow the idea, start from what your machines do, not what they are. Write the jobs down in plain words first, then find the living thing that does that job in a garden, a forest or a river. A few more to start from: mycelium for something that quietly connects everything, mulch for a cache, rootstock for the machine others are built from, heron for something that waits and watches.
Further reading
- RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer, Don Libes, 1990. Still the best short guide to hostnames.
- A Solarpunk Manifesto, ReDes. On building technology that cooperates with living systems instead of dominating them.
- Three projects from one pile of hardware. Where these machines are headed.