Network Name Generator

Network names cover two very different jobs. The first is the Wi-Fi SSID your neighbours and guests see, where puns rule: The LAN Before Time, Pretty Fly for a Wi-Fi, Abraham Linksys and Not the Wi-Fi You're Looking For are all in the classic canon. The second is the naming scheme for hostnames, VLANs and segments inside the network, where sysadmins want a themed set that is easy to say over the phone, easy to type, and large enough to grow into.

RFC 1178, "Choosing a Name for Your Computer", still gives the best advice: use themes rather than descriptions, avoid names you'll outgrow, and pick words that are short and easy to spell. That is why so many shops name machines after planets and moons, Greek letters, Norse or Greek gods, mythological beasts, famous computer scientists, trees, mountains or starships. A scheme like Odin for the firewall, Heimdall for the gateway and Bifrost for the VPN tells the on-call engineer what a box does without a wiki lookup.

For segments and VLANs, plain functional labels are the norm: Core, Edge, DMZ, Guest, IoT, Mgmt, OOB, Lab, Prod, Staging. Mix one functional label with one theme name (iot-loki, prod-jupiter) and you get names that are both memorable and self-documenting.