Naming things revisited

How long has it been since you last saw a conversation over different blogs syndicated at the same planet? Well, it’s one of the good memories of the early 2010s. And there is an opportunity to re-engage! 😃

I came across Evgeni’s post “naming things is hard” in Planet Debian. So, what names have I given my computers?

I have had many since the mid-1990s I also had several during the decade before that, but before Linux, my computers didn’t hve a formal name. Naming my computers something nice Linux gave me.

I have forgotten many. Some of the names I have used:

• My years in Iztacala: I worked as a sysadmin between 1999 and 2003. When I arrived, we already had two servers, campus and tlali, and one computer pending installation, ollin. The credit for their names is not mine.
  • campus: A mighty SPARCstation 5! Because it was the main (and for some time, the only!) server in our campus.
  • tlali: A regular PC used as a Linux server. “Tlali” means something like lands in náhuatl, the prehispanic language spoken in central Mexico. My workplace was Iztacala, which translates as “the place where there are white houses”; “tlali” and “cali” are related words.
  • ollin: was a big IBM RS/6000 system running AIX. It came to us, probably already obsolete, as a (useless) donation from Fundación UNAM; I don’t recall the exact model, but it looked very much like this one. Ran on AIX. We had no software for it, and frankly… never really got it to be productive. Funnily, its name “Ollin” means “movement” in Náhuatl. I added some servers to the lineup during the two years I was in Iztacala:
  • tlamantli: An Alpha 21164 server that doubled as my desktop. Given the tradition in Iztacala of naming things in Náhuatl, but trying to be somewhat funny, tlamantli just means a thing; I understand the word is usually bound to a quantifier.
  • tepancuate: A regular PC system we set up with OpenBSD as a firewall. It means “wall” in Náhuatl.
• Following the first CONSOL (National Free Software Conference), I was invited to work as a programmer at UPN, Universidad Pedagógica Nacional in 2003–2004. There I was not directly in charge of any of the servers (I mostly used ajusco, managed by Víctor, named after the mountain on whose slopes our campus was). But my only computer there was:
  • shmate: , meaning old rag in yiddish. The word shmate is used like thingy, although it would usually mean old and slightly worn-out thingy. It was a quite nice machine, though. I had a Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM, not bad for 2003!
• I started my present work at Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas, UNAM 20 years ago(!), in 2005. Here I am a systems administrator, so naturally I am in charge of the servers. And over the years, we have had a fair share of machines:
  • mosca: is my desktop. It has changed hardware several times (of course) over the years, but it’s still the same Debian Sid install I did in January 2005 (I must have reinstalled once, when I got it replaced by an AMD64). Its name is the Spanish name for the common fly. I have often used it to describe my work, since I got in the early 1990s an automated bilingual translator called TRANSLATE; it came on seven 5.25” floppies. As a teenager, I somehow got my hands on a copy, and installed it in my 80386SX. Fed it its own README to see how it fared. And the first sentence made me burst in laughter: «TRANSLATE performs on the fly translation» ⇒ «TRADUCE realiza traducción sobre la mosca». Starting then, I always think of «on the fly» as «sobre la mosca». As Groucho said, I guess… Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.
  • lafa When I got there, we didn’t have any servers; for some time, I took one of the computer lab’s systems to serve our web page and receive mail. But when we got some budget approved, we bought a fsckin-big server. Big as in four-rack-units. Double CPUs (not multicore, but two independent early Xeon CPUs, if I’m not mistaken. Still, it was still a 32 bits system). לאפה (lafa) is a big, more flexible kind of Arab bread than pita; I loved it when I lived in Israel. And there is an album (and song) by Teapacks, an Israeli group I am very fond of, «hajaim shelja belafa» (your life in a lafa), saying, «hey, brother! Your life is in a lafa. You throw everything in a big pita. You didn’t have time to chew, you already swallowed it».
  • joma: Our firewall. חומה means wall in Hebrew.
  • baktun: lafa was great, but over the years, it got old. After many years, I finally got the Institute to buy a second server. We got it in December 2012. There was a lot of noise around then because the world was supposed to end on 2012.12.21, as the Mayan calendar reached a full long cycle. This long cycle is called /baktun/. So, it was fitting as the name of the new server.
  • teom: As lafa was almost immediately decomissioned and turned into a virtual machine in the much bigger baktun,, I wanted to split services, make off-hardware backups, and such. Almost two years later, my request was approved and we bought a second server. But instead of buying it from a “regular” provider, we got it off a stash of machines bought by our university’s central IT entity. To my surprise, it had the exact same hardware configuration as baktun, bought two years earlier. Even the serial number was absurdly close. So, I had it as baktun’s long-lost twin. Hence, תְאוֹם (transliterated as teom), the Hebrew word for twin. About a year after teom arrived to my life, my twin children were also born, but their naming followed a completely different logic process than my computers 😉
• At home or on the road: I am sure I am missing several systems over the years.
  • pato: The earliest system I had that I remember giving a name to. I built a 80386SX in 1991, buying each component separately. The box had a 1-inch square for integrators to put their branding — And after some time, I carefully printed and applied a label that said Catarmáquina PATO (the first word, very small). Pato (duck) is how we’d call a no-brand system. Catarmáquina because it was the system where I ran my BBS, CatarSYS (1992-1994).
  • malenkaya: In 2008 I got a 9” Acer Aspire One netbook (Atom N270 i386, 1GB RAM). I really loved that machine! Although it was quite limited, it was my main computer while on the road for almost five years. malenkaya means small (for female) in Russian.
  • matlalli: After malenkaya started being too limited for my regular use, I bought its successor Acer Aspire One model. This one was way larger (10.1 inches screen) and I wasn’t too happy about it at the beginning, but I ended up loving it. So much, in fact, that we bought at least four very similar such computers for us and our family members. This computer was dirt cheap, and endured five further years of lugging everywhere. matlalli is due to its turquoise color: it is the Náhuatl word for blue or green.
  • cajita: In 2014 I got a beautiful Cubox i4 Pro computer. It took me some time to get it to boot and be generally useful, but it ended up being my home server for many years, until I had a power supply malfunction which bricked it. cajita means little box in Spanish.
  • pitentzin: Another 10.1” Acer Aspire One (the last in the lineup; the CPU is a Celeron 877, so it does run AMD64, and it supports up to 16GB RAM, I think I have it with 12). We originally bought it for my family in Argentina, but they didn’t really use it much, and after a couple of years we got it back. We decided it would be the computer for the kids, at least for the time being. And although it is a 2013 laptop, it’s still our everyday media station driver. Oh, and the name pitentzin? Náhuatl for /children/.
  • tliltik: In 2018, I bought a second-hand Thinkpad X230. It was my daily driver for about three years. I reflashed its firmware with CoreBoot, and repeated the experience for seven people IIRC in DebConf18. With it, I learned to love the Thinkpad keyboard. Naturally for a thinkpad, tliltik means black in Náhuatl.
  • uesebe: When COVID struck, we were all sent home, and my university lent me a nice recently bought Intel i7 HP laptop. At first, I didn’t want to mess up its Windows install (so I set up a USB-drive-based installation, hence the name uesebe); when it was clear the lockdown was going to be long (and that tliltik had too many aches to be used for my daily work), I transferred the install to its HDD and used it throughout the pandemic, until mid 2022.
  • bolex: I bought this computer for my father in 2020. After he passed away in May 2022, I took his computer, and named it bolex because that’s the brand of the 8mm cinema camera he loved and had since 1955, and with which he created most of his films. It is really an entry-level machine, though (a single-core, dual-threaded Celeron), and it was too limited when I started distance-teaching again, so I had to store it as an emergency system.
  • yogurtu: During the pandemics, I spent quite a bit of time fiddling with the Raspberry Pi family. But all in all, while they are nice machines for many uses, they are too limited to be daily drivers. Or even enough for taking i.e. to Debconf and have them be my conference computer. I bought an almost-new-but-used (≈2 year old) Yoga C630 ARM laptop. I often brag about my happy experience with it, and how it brings a reasonably powerful ARM Linux system to my everyday life. In our last DebConf, I didn’t even pick up my USB-C power connector every day; the battery just lasts over ten hours of active work. But I’m not here doing ads, right? yogurtu naturally is derived from the Yoga brand it has, but is taken from Yogurtu Nghé, a fictional character by the Argentinian comical-musical group Les Luthiers, that has marked my life.
  • misnenet: Towards mid 2023, when it was clear that bolex would not be a good daily driver, and considering we would be spending six months in Argentina, I bought a new desktop system. It seems I have something for small computers: I decided for a refurbished HP EliteDesk 800 G5 Mini i7 system. I picked it because, at close to 18×18×3.5cm it perfectly fits in my DebConf18 bag. A laptop, it is clearly not, but it can easily travel with me when needed. Oh, and the name? Because for this model, HP uses different enclosures based on the kind of processor: The i3 model has a flat, black aluminum top… But mine has lots of tiny holes, covering two areas of roughly 15×7cm, with a tiny hole every ~2mm, and with a solid strip between them. Of course, מִסנֶנֶת (misnenet, in Hebrew) means strainer.