Sci-Fi Server Names: 300+ Hostname Ideas for Your Homelab, NAS, and Every Box on the Rack
Nobody remembers which box is 192.168.1.42. Everybody remembers which box is called nostromo. That is the whole argument for giving a machine a real name, and why “what should I call this thing” comes back every time new hardware lands on the shelf.
This is a list of sci-fi server names organised the way homelab people actually think: by what the machine does. Routers get gatekeeper names. Storage gets cargo-hold names. The media box gets something that sounds like a screening room. That mapping turns a pile of hostnames into something you can navigate at two in the morning.
Underneath the lists there are three complete naming schemes you can adopt wholesale. A list gives you one good name. A scheme gives you a rule that keeps producing good names for a decade, which is what you actually need, because you will buy more hardware than you plan to.
And at the end, the part almost nobody writes down: a hostname is not a display name. It has to survive DNS.
Building the fiction around the hardware too? The spaceship name generator and planet name generator will hand you a whole fleet or star system in one go, which is exactly what a scheme needs.
Why Sci-Fi Names Work So Well for Servers
People name machines after birds and cheeses too. Sci-fi wins for three reasons.
The vocabulary is already sorted by function. Science fiction spent a century inventing names for exactly what a server is: a thing that stores, computes, watches, or guards a door. A NAS genuinely is a cargo hold. A hypervisor genuinely is a reactor.
The names are already short and phonetic. Franchise names are invented to be said out loud and remembered, the same pressure a hostname is under. Two or three syllables, distinct opening consonant.
It scales. A good source has dozens of names in it, not four. When you buy the fifth machine the scheme still has somewhere to put it, and that is the most common way a naming convention dies.
The trade-off is real: sci-fi names carry no information. tatooine does not tell a housemate which box the router is.
What Makes a Good Server Name
Short enough to type without resenting it
Every ssh, every scp, every config file. A name you loved at eight characters is fine. The same name at fourteen is a tax you pay several times a day. Five to nine characters is the comfortable band.
Unambiguous spoken and read
If you have to spell it out to yourself, it is too clever. Names differing by one letter are worse than names differing by a syllable.
Tied to a role, not to a job
A role is a category: this is a storage machine. A job is what runs on it this month. Role names survive a rebuild. Job names do not.
Part of a set with room left in it
The best answer to “what do I call this one” is that the scheme already answered it. Pick a source deep enough that the twelfth machine has an obvious name waiting.
Legal as a DNS label
Letters, digits and hyphens. No spaces, no apostrophes, no underscores. This rules out more names than you would think, and it gets its own section below.
Router and Firewall Names
Everything passes through this machine, so name it after a threshold. Doors, gates, checkpoints, airlocks, the customs desk at the edge of the settlement.
- airlock
- bulkhead
- blastdoor
- deflector
- gatekeeper
- checkpoint
- jumpgate
- stargate
- warpgate
- sentry
- watchtower
- picket
- hyperlane
- threshold
- wormhole
- dockingring
- customs
- blackice
- icewall
- netrunner
- edgerunner
- moseisley
- perimeter
- chokepoint
Storage and NAS Names
Storage wants weight. Holds, vaults, silos, the ship that hauls the ore rather than the ship that fights. If you run two arrays, this group splits neatly into fast and bulk.
- nostromo
- cargobay
- cargohold
- hangarbay
- spacedock
- quartermaster
- silo
- datacore
- memorycore
- monolith
- tesseract
- hypercube
- blackbox
- datavault
- cryobay
- stasisbay
- depot
- warehouse13
- thelibrary
- reservoir
- cistern
- oreprocessor
- freighter
- bulkhauler
Media Server Names
The media box is the one non-technical people in the house will name out loud, so it can afford to be obvious. Screening rooms, viewscreens, holodecks.
- holodeck
- holosuite
- holotable
- viewscreen
- mainviewer
- bigscreen
- tenforward
- quarks
- reccroom
- mediabay
- starlight
- holoreel
- jukebox9
- broadcaster
- transmitter
- signaltower
- playback
- screeningroom
- silverscreen
- cinemabay
- vidfeed
- holovid
Hypervisor and Compute Node Names
Compute is engines. Reactors, drives, cores, the thing that makes the ship go. This group numbers naturally in a cluster, because a ship having four engines is not a stretch. To name nodes after the intelligences running on them instead, the robot name generator fills a rack faster than any list.
- warpcore
- reactor
- fusioncore
- impulse
- maindrive
- hyperdrive
- ionengine
- thruster
- plasmacore
- singularity
- deepthought
- multivac
- muthur
- mainframe
- bigiron
- corenode
- forge
- crucible
- dynamo
- antimatter
- drivesection
- enginedeck
Backup and Archive Names
Backups are about second chances, so the names should sound sealed. Arks, lifeboats, cold storage, the capsule you bury in the ground. There is a quiet satisfaction in restoring from lastresort.
- archive
- vault
- coldstorage
- deepfreeze
- cryosleep
- cryopod
- hibernaculum
- lastresort
- secondchance
- failsafe
- deadman
- blacksite
- arkship
- ark
- lifeboat
- escapepod
- memoryalpha
- akashic
- timecapsule
- longnow
- rollback
- snapshot
Monitoring and Observability Names
The monitoring box watches everything and complains, which in fiction is either an oracle or a surveillance state. Both work.
- oracle
- cassandra
- sentinel
- overwatch
- bigbrother
- panopticon
- theeye
- seer
- augur
- delphi
- precog
- precrime
- agatha
- tricorder
- sensorarray
- longrange
- scanner
- lookout
- crowsnest
- beacon
- telemetry
- blinkenlights
Dev, Test, and Scratch Box Names
These machines exist to be broken. Name them after the labs and corporations where things go wrong, or after the crewman in the red shirt. A box called redshirt is one you will not hesitate to wipe.
- sandbox
- testbed
- thelab
- skunkworks
- area51
- blackmesa
- aperture
- weyland
- yutani
- tyrell
- cyberdyne
- umbrella
- prototype
- mockup
- redshirt
- crashtest
- guineapig
- labrat
- petridish
- burnin
- staging
- scratchpad
Raspberry Pi and Small Node Names
Little machines get droid names. This is the deepest well here, because franchises produce astonishing numbers of small helpful robots and the names are already short. Three Pis called huey, dewey and louie is a scheme in itself. For more, the droid name generator makes the alphanumeric kind on demand.
- r2d2
- c3po
- bb8
- k2so
- ig88
- chopper
- astromech
- probedroid
- gonk
- mousedroid
- pitdroid
- seeker
- walle
- evebot
- marvin
- bender
- robby
- tars
- case
- kipp
- huey
- dewey
- louie
- scoutnode
Desktop and Workstation Names
Your daily driver is where you sit, so name it after where the pilot sits. The bridge, the conn, the cockpit, the chair. It also keeps your machine visibly separate from infrastructure.
- bridge
- conn
- helm
- cockpit
- flightdeck
- captainschair
- readyroom
- workbench
- pilothouse
- yoke
- throttle
- terminal
- console
- viewport
- obsdeck
- navcomp
- dashboard
- hotseat
- mainconsole
- commandpost
Guest Network and DMZ Names
Anything exposed or untrusted should sound like it is outside the walls. Neutral zones, quarantine, the badlands. This is the one group where the name doing semantic work matters: you want a small flinch every time you put something out there.
- dmz
- neutralzone
- outerrim
- badlands
- thezone
- wasteland
- nomansland
- quarantine
- decon
- isoward
- brig
- holdingcell
- waitingroom
- anteroom
- frontier
- borderworld
- exclusion
- spaceport
- cantina
- guesthab
Three Complete Schemes You Can Adopt Wholesale
Here is the part the forum threads never reach. Picking names one at a time is how you end up with nas1, tatooine, plexbox and ubuntu-server-new on one network: not a convention, an archaeological record. Commit to one source and the question stops being “what should I call this” and becomes “what is next in the set.”
Scheme 1: Star Wars planets
The most common homelab scheme there is, for good reason: short, phonetically distinct, hundreds of them. A loose thematic fit is available if you want it. hoth for cold storage, kamino for the box that clones VMs, dagobah for the one hiding in a closet.
Watch the spelling on a few. kashyyyk has three consecutive y characters and you will typo it forever, so either commit or skip it.
- tatooine
- hoth
- endor
- naboo
- coruscant
- dagobah
- alderaan
- bespin
- kamino
- geonosis
- mustafar
- kashyyyk
- yavin
- jakku
- jedha
- scarif
- crait
- exegol
- ahchto
- dathomir
- mandalore
- lothal
- corellia
- ryloth
Scheme 2: Starships
Best if your machines are more alike than different, because a fleet is a natural set of peers. It crosses franchises without looking messy, since every one is still a ship. Compute nodes as warships, the NAS as a freighter, the backup box as a lifeboat.
One caution: nebuchadnezzar is fifteen characters and you will grow to dislike it. Beautiful name, terrible hostname.
- enterprise
- defiant
- voyager
- discovery
- reliant
- excelsior
- prometheus
- serenity
- rocinante
- sulaco
- nebuchadnezzar
- normandy
- galactica
- pegasus
- bebop
- planetexpress
- heartofgold
- reddwarf
- starbug
- eventhorizon
- milano
- razorcrest
- ebonhawk
- tantive
Scheme 3: Malevolent AIs
The funniest of the three, because every machine in your house is now named after something that turned on its creators. It pairs well with the cyberpunk name generator if you want handles for the humans on the network too.
The downside is tonal. If anyone else ever administers this network, explaining that the database lives on glados is a conversation you will have more than once.
- hal9000
- skynet
- glados
- samaritan
- wintermute
- neuromancer
- shodan
- ultron
- viki
- proteus
- colossus
- guardian
- auto
- ash
- roybatty
- agentsmith
- architect
- legion
- geth
- omnius
- erasmus
- wopr
- joshua
- zeroone
How to Build Your Own Scheme
If none of the three fit, build one. Pick a source with depth, then a mapping rule from the source to your machines.
Step 1: A source with at least 30 names in it
Planets, ships, moons, characters, factions, stations, particles. Anything with a canonical list you can look up. Thirty, because you want to still be adding machines in five years without changing the rule.
Step 2: The mapping rule
There are only three, and they trade off against each other:
- Thematic. Cold planet for cold storage, engine for compute. Most satisfying, hardest to keep consistent, breaks when you repurpose a box.
- Arbitrary. Next name off the list, no meaning attached. Ugly to purists, and by far the most durable, because nothing about the name can ever become wrong.
- Hybrid. Arbitrary name plus a role alias in DNS, so the box is hoth but it also answers to nas.lan via a CNAME. Most people land here eventually.
Step 3: Decide what happens when you run out
Write it down, even as one line in a text file. “Next planet alphabetically” is a rule. “Whatever I felt like” is how you get server2-new-final.
Step 4: Separate the name from the address
Give every machine a permanent identity name, then layer service names on top with DNS records. The hardware keeps its name for life and the services move freely.
What to Avoid: A Hostname Is Not a Display Name
This is where naming lists stop being useful, because a WiFi network name can be anything you can type and a hostname cannot. Here are the constraints that actually bite.
Letters, digits and hyphens, and nothing else
The preferred hostname syntax comes from RFC 1035: a label must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and contain only letters, digits and hyphens in between. RFC 1123 later relaxed that to allow a leading digit. The rule is usually called LDH, for letters-digits-hyphen.
So no spaces, and no apostrophes, which quietly rules out a lot of good names. Quark's Bar becomes quarks. That is why every item above is lowercase and squashed together.
Underscores catch people out. An underscore is not valid in a hostname under LDH, even though it is legal in other kinds of DNS names, which is exactly why records like _dmarc and SRV records like _http._tcp use it: the underscore guarantees they cannot collide with a real host. Some resolvers are lenient about it and some are strictly not.
63 characters per label, and a much lower practical ceiling
The hard limits are 63 octets for a single DNS label and 255 octets for a complete encoded domain name, set in RFC 1035. The 63 comes from the wire format: the length byte in front of each label reserves its top two bits for flags, leaving six bits, and six bits maxes out at 63. Because the encoding also spends a byte per label length plus a terminating zero, the textual form of a full name tops out around 253 characters.
You will never hit that. The real ceiling is lower: on Windows the computer name is still bound by the NetBIOS limit of 15 characters, which Microsoft documents explicitly. The human ceiling is lower still.
You have to type it, forever
A hostname is not something you read, it is something you type, dozens of times a day, often without looking, often mid-command where a typo costs a round trip. nebuchadnezzar is a magnificent name for a hovercraft and a fourteen-character daily tax on your fingers.
The test is simple: type the candidate ten times fast without looking at the keys. Fumble it more than once and pick another. Tab completion helps but does not save you, because half your names starting with the same three letters defeats it.
Mixed case is a trap
DNS lookups are case-insensitive. RFC 4343 spells it out: an uppercase ASCII letter in a query matches the lowercase one, so Serenity and serenity resolve to the same thing. Case is preserved on output where convenient, but that is a courtesy, not a guarantee.
So a capitalised hostname looks tidy in your notes and then gets flattened by something in the chain: a resolver, a log aggregator, a container runtime, a certificate tool. Now your dashboards show two hosts where there is one, and string comparisons in scripts silently stop matching. Pick lowercase every time.
Your scheme will run out, so plan for the fourth box
The classic version: you name three machines anewhope, empire and jedi, feel pleased with yourself, and eleven months later a fourth arrives with nowhere to go. Now you either break the scheme or bolt a prequel onto it.
The same failure hides in any set with a fixed, famous size. Three original films. Four inner planets. Prefer sources that are effectively unbounded, and if you love a closed set, decide the overflow rule in advance.
Never name a box after what it currently does
plexserver is reasonable on the day you set it up and a lie eighteen months later when that machine is the backup target. Renaming means chasing every config file, SSH entry, bookmark and certificate that referenced it.
This is the whole argument for the sci-fi convention: an arbitrary name cannot become wrong. tatooine is still tatooine after you reinstall it, because it never claimed anything. Put the function in DNS instead.
50 More Sci-Fi Server Name Ideas
Moons, minor bodies and subatomic particles: the deep benches of hostname naming. Short, DNS-safe, and each group is already a complete scheme on its own.
- quasar
- pulsar
- magnetar
- nebula
- corona
- helios
- selene
- deimos
- phobos
- europa
- titan
- callisto
- ganymede
- iapetus
- triton
- charon
- oberon
- miranda
- ariel
- umbriel
- rhea
- dione
- tethys
- enceladus
- hyperion
- nereid
- vesta
- ceres
- pallas
- eris
- sedna
- makemake
- haumea
- tachyon
- graviton
- positron
- neutrino
- muon
- boson
- lepton
- hadron
- baryon
- gluon
- fermion
- photon
- plasma
- ion
- flux
- entropy
- gradient
Final Thoughts
The best server name is one you can type without thinking, that stays accurate after you rebuild the machine, and that fits a set with room to grow. For a safe default, take starships. For the joke, take malevolent AIs. For what most homelabs converge on anyway, take Star Wars planets and stop overthinking it.
What matters more than the source is the discipline. Lowercase, LDH only, short enough to type, arbitrary rather than descriptive, and service names layered on with DNS rather than baked into the hardware. Follow that and your network stays readable through three generations of machines.
Need more raw material? The hacker name generator and robot name generator produce short, punchy output that maps onto hostnames almost directly, and the planet generator will hand you an entire unclaimed star system.
FAQ About Sci-Fi Server Names
What should I name my home server?
Pick a source with at least thirty names in it and take them in order rather than one at a time. Star Wars planets, starships and moons are the most durable options. Keep it lowercase, under about ten characters, and unrelated to what the machine currently runs.
Can a hostname contain an underscore?
Not in a valid hostname. The LDH rule from RFC 952 and RFC 1123 allows only letters, digits and hyphens. Underscores are legal in other DNS names, which is why records such as _dmarc use them, but a machine name with an underscore will be rejected or mishandled somewhere in your stack.
How long can a hostname be?
A single DNS label is capped at 63 characters and a full encoded domain name at 255 octets, roughly 253 characters of text. In practice Windows caps the computer name at 15 because of NetBIOS, and your own patience caps it around ten.
Should hostnames be uppercase or lowercase?
Lowercase. DNS lookups are case-insensitive, so mixed case buys nothing and guarantees some tool will normalise it and leave you with two spellings of one host in your logs.
What is a good naming scheme for a homelab?
An arbitrary permanent name per machine plus a descriptive DNS alias per service. The machine is hoth for life; nas.lan and media.lan point wherever those services happen to live this year. Nothing ever has to be renamed.