Partial cam.ac.uk machine names FAQ

Some of the weird and wonderful names of machines in Cambridge, and the people who own them ...

This is a superset of http://ban.joh.cam.ac.uk/~cr212/silly/hostnames .

For more of this sort of frivolity, see www.ucam.org

Live machines

Past machines

Those never in the DNS

• whip.jesus
• mug.jesus
• christ.jesus
• jesus.christs
• soft.sel
• man.sel
• die.sel
• chi.sel
• mrs.robinson
• dancing.quns
• eight.quns
• harley.quns - but ceb28b.quns (Clare Boothby) pretends to be this
• karaoke.quns
• manna.quns
• sea.quns
• three.kings
• span.kings

".house" names (people's home machines)

dura.sel -> wheel.house
prison.sel -> jail.house
voltaic.sel -> dog.house
fuel.sel -> wood.house
(Chris Reed)

carou.sel -> toy.house
solar.sel -> light.house
(Unknown)

moh.joh -> store.house  (so called due to its 22Gb of disk)
uglykid.joh -> block.house
spearmint.joh -> mug.house
rodney.joh (a Dell) -> mad.house
(David Mansell)

Other information which came out in the discussion about hostnames

Richard Watts' (rrw1000) naming scheme:

Dan Sheppard   wrote:
>Richard Watts used to have a machine called rosie, whose name is quite
>a mystery to all but Richard. It was the cause of much discussion at
>the time. My pet theory is that it was named after someone mentioned
>on a plaque above Selwyn B staircase (where Richard lived).

 You will undoubtedly be pleased to hear that you are entirely 
wrong :-).

 After rosie, I went through Minbari warships (trigati, mphili) and
human ships (cortez), and ended up at mythological figures
(epona, camaxtli, bahamut, oannes). I could tell you how I picked
rosie, but then I'd have to kill you :-).

 Nowadays, I have a simple algorithm for picking machine names - I open
Routledge's `Who's Who In Non-Classical Mythology' at a random page, and
pick a name I like the sound of. If I'm in a bad mood, the name comes from
the long list of unpronounceable gods in the entry on `Aztec Religion' :-).

 The Origami project uses the names of goose species (except for stkitts,
which isn't really ours). This turns out not to be such a good idea, since
there are only three memorable ones (greylag, canada and snow).

Simon Tatham:

We never had la.trin (unfortunately, or not), although there was
dex.trin (Tony) and doc.trin (dunno who)...

King's didn't do choosable hostnames, which was a shame, because
`three' and `span' would have been fun.

Personally I think oh.jesus gets the award for Cambridge college
domain name abuse. Oxford has paul.merton.ox.ac.uk.

Abuse? Who, us?

From: Mark Longair <mhl@pobox.com>

I guess it's a different kind of abuse, but I was rather amused by the
typo that somehow appeared in wagner.jesus....

... which became wanger.jesus.

And finally, the history of oh.jesus and a lot more:

From: mk270@cam.ac.uk (Martin Keegan)

I have to confess that all three of these (oh.jesus, paul.merton,
wanger.jesus) are connected with me.

oh.jesus was dreamt up in the Little Rose by the lodger who was staying
at my house, and loudly approved by the omnipresent mwk20, who had registered
the name whip.pet (131.111.209.176, not its current IP) for the machine
which was to become oh.jesus (I didn't even TRY to register whip.jesus)

paul.merton is largely the fault of one Robin Stevens (who had
jw31.merton.ox.ac.uk, a bloody-well run student Linux box on which I
had accounts (which gave me martin@jw31.merton.ox.ac.uk - surprised
it was allowed)) who did the internet humour archive thing.

We really need a Cambridge Uni DNS names FAQ. Or maybe a HOWTO ;)

Mk

And thus this document was born.

What do you call a group of people from Queens?

From: dcr24@gull.dpmms.cam.ac.uk (Duncan Richer)

Martin Read (mpread@chiark.greenend.org.uk) wrote:
: In article <7nkchs$t1q$1@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>,
: Duncan Richer  wrote:
: >I've only heard Queensmen used.  However, we really need to come up with
: >something a little more appropriate for both sexes.  
: >I'll plump for Queenies until I hear any better responses.


Only if we all have to be referred to individually as Reg.
That might just work.

Julian, from the CS:

From: Julian King 

Hermes is the mail _system_.  The machines themselves are colours.
I learned recently that the original naming scheme for these colours
were shades of bruises  :-)

(returning to the original topic)

In this office the tradition is for monsters, however since I have a 
personal tradition of bending rules to name things after food I called
my machine cookie.  Previously I worked somewhere which named its computers
after cult TV programs - one of the first machines I named was called
porridge - somewhat gratuitously.  I then started a new cluster and they
were named after sweets - smarties, polo, flake etc.