1 Feb
2017
1 Feb
'17
8:43 p.m.
I hope this isn't too far off topic here.
I've been meaning to rename the few systems I administer with names
that reference famous (or at least somewhat well-known in the proper
circles) historical UNIX systems, but I have been unable to find any
lists of such names so have no real place to start. About the closest
I _was_ able to find is the ARPANET map[1] of the late 1970s that is
on Wikipedia and is occasionally circulated, but which gives mostly
architecture, location and links, not any system (host) names.
Short of unimaginative things like calling my home router IMP[2] or
things like that, can anyone either suggest names with a bit of
background (where they were, what hardware, what time period, etc.),
or point me toward online resources where I can find lists of those?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,_march_1977.png
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor
--
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se
“People who think they know everything really annoy
those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)
1 Feb
1 Feb
8:46 p.m.
Do you have access to "the Matrix" by John Quarterman. There are the UUCP
maps in there with >>tons<< of host names - like ihnp4, decvax, etc...
On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 3:43 PM, Michael Kjörling <michael(a)kjorling.se>
wrote:
I hope this isn't too far off topic here.
I've been meaning to rename the few systems I administer with names
that reference famous (or at least somewhat well-known in the proper
circles) historical UNIX systems, but I have been unable to find any
lists of such names so have no real place to start. About the closest
I _was_ able to find is the ARPANET map[1] of the late 1970s that is
on Wikipedia and is occasionally circulated, but which gives mostly
architecture, location and links, not any system (host) names.
Short of unimaginative things like calling my home router IMP[2] or
things like that, can anyone either suggest names with a bit of
background (where they were, what hardware, what time period, etc.),
or point me toward online resources where I can find lists of those?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,_
march_1977.png
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor
--
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se
“People who think they know everything really annoy
those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)
8:50 p.m.
BTW: Many of the systems from the Arpanet days had very unimaginative
host names: CMUA, "MIT-AI" are examples. CMMP was CMU's C.mmp, Vision
was the Vision system and Audio was the language system so don't expect a
lot of wild and crazy names.
Clem
On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 3:43 PM, Michael Kjörling <michael(a)kjorling.se>
wrote:
I hope this isn't too far off topic here.
I've been meaning to rename the few systems I administer with names
that reference famous (or at least somewhat well-known in the proper
circles) historical UNIX systems, but I have been unable to find any
lists of such names so have no real place to start. About the closest
I _was_ able to find is the ARPANET map[1] of the late 1970s that is
on Wikipedia and is occasionally circulated, but which gives mostly
architecture, location and links, not any system (host) names.
Short of unimaginative things like calling my home router IMP[2] or
things like that, can anyone either suggest names with a bit of
background (where they were, what hardware, what time period, etc.),
or point me toward online resources where I can find lists of those?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,_
march_1977.png
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Message_Processor
--
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se
“People who think they know everything really annoy
those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)
9:11 p.m.
Michael Kjörling wrote:
can anyone either suggest names with a bit of
background (where they
were, what hardware, what time period, etc.),
MIT-EDDIE, early distrbution point for GNU software. More details here:
http://www.driver-aces.com/ronnie.html
Clem Cole writes:
BTW: Many of the systems from the Arpanet days had
very unimaginative
host names: CMUA, "MIT-AI" are examples.
Better add that those are not Unix machines.
9:33 p.m.
Oh, I've got some. Not that old, 80's.
UW-Madison
slovax - 11/750 that had the BSD sources on it. Spent many a happy
hour reading there and I've always had a personal machine
called slovax ever since. mcvoy.com internally is slovax.
speedy - 8600 that was the main research/faculty machine. Also
...!uwisc!rsch
Tokoyo Institute of Technology (TIT)
So the back story here is I was one of the Unix geeks doing a Unix
port to the ETA-10. TIT was taking delivery of a big liquid cooled
machine and of course we weren't ready. I got sent over with 3 tapes,
one was the baseline that was sort of checked in, one was my port of
Lachman (who bought it from I think Convergent)'s TCP/IP stack, and
one was some VM thing, I think big pages but I'm not sure.
They sent me over there with a small replica of our development
environment (Sun 3/260 file / compute server and 2 3/50 workstations)
and told me "Merge this stuff and install it, TIT wants all of it".
So I get to Tokoyo and the machines show up and I'm installing SunOS
and I have to name them:
3/260: BigTIT
3/50: LeftTIT
3/50: RightTIT
and I even put them physically how you would imagine.
It only lasted until they figured out what it meant but I didn't get
in trouble. Because a different story had just happened that had
made the Japanese sales guys bust up in laughter and they had taken
me out we all got shit faced a few days before I had to rename the
machines. Happy to share that story if anyone is still reading :)
Sun
The source machines that held the SCCS history before they went to
NSE/NSElite/Teamware:
Argon
Radon
Krypton
That's all I can think of for now, not sure if any of it is actually that
all interesting.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
9:57 p.m.
On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 4:33 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
It only lasted until they figured out what it meant
but I didn't get
in trouble. Because a different story had just happened that had
made the Japanese sales guys bust up in laughter and they had taken
me out we all got shit faced a few days before I had to rename the
machines. Happy to share that story if anyone is still reading :)
Outstanding -- and yes please do.
10:08 p.m.
On Wed, Feb 01, 2017 at 04:57:58PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 4:33 PM, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
OK. So the ETA was in the machine room, the Sun machines were just
outside in sort of a lobby that was my office. I was frequently in
the machine room to do something, I dunno what, it was cold and loud in
there, I hated it, but I was in there all the time. Probably doing a
hard reset on the machine I just screwed up.
The Japanese sales guys were there constantly, watching, they wanted
the sale to go through so they could collect their commission I guess.
There was a phone in there and it would ring and a sales guy would pick
it up saying "Moshi, Moshi" which I took to mean "Hi" or
"hello".
It was always corporate calling to see how things were going.
So one day I'm in there by myself and the phone rings and without thinking
about it (I don't speak Japanese so WTF was I thinking?), I pick it up
and say "Mushi, Mushi". Too which I get a stream of horrified Japanense
and I just hang up.
The sales guys show later and I say "I answered a call for you". "Oh,
yeah, what did you say?" "Mushi, mushi". Stunned silence and then they
are rolling on the floor laughing.
I'm going "What? What did I do?".
They say "Corporate called to find out how things are going and the
software guy said 'bug, bug' and hung up".
We all went out drinking that night, those sales guys were all right.
Seemed sort of cold before that but we were buds from there forward.
I'll bet you a pile of money somewhere there is a sales guy in Japan
who tells this story, probably not in a way that is flattering to me :)
(Note this about 30 years ago and I can't remember if Moshi is hi or if it
is Mushi that is hi, but you get the idea).
--larry "bug, bug" mcvoy
It only lasted until they figured out what it
meant but I didn't get
in trouble. Because a different story had just happened that had
made the Japanese sales guys bust up in laughter and they had taken
me out we all got shit faced a few days before I had to rename the
machines. Happy to share that story if anyone is still reading :)
???Outstanding -- and yes please do.??? 
10:20 p.m.
On Wed, 1 Feb 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
There was a phone in there and it would ring and a
sales guy would pick
it up saying "Moshi, Moshi" which I took to mean "Hi" or
"hello".
It was always corporate calling to see how things were going.
So one day I'm in there by myself and the phone rings and without thinking
about it (I don't speak Japanese so WTF was I thinking?), I pick it up
and say "Mushi, Mushi". Too which I get a stream of horrified Japanense
and I just hang up.
The sales guys show later and I say "I answered a call for you". "Oh,
yeah, what did you say?" "Mushi, mushi". Stunned silence and then they
are rolling on the floor laughing.
I'm going "What? What did I do?".
They say "Corporate called to find out how things are going and the
software guy said 'bug, bug' and hung up".
We all went out drinking that night, those sales guys were all right.
Seemed sort of cold before that but we were buds from there forward.
I'll bet you a pile of money somewhere there is a sales guy in Japan
who tells this story, probably not in a way that is flattering to me :)
(Note this about 30 years ago and I can't remember if Moshi is hi or if it
is Mushi that is hi, but you get the idea).
--larry "bug, bug" mcvoy
You were right - "moshi-moshi" is "hello" and "mushi" is
bug.
(I picked up a little bit of Japanese from 20 years of watching anime...
lol)
-uso.
3 Feb
3 Feb
1:51 a.m.
On Wed, 1 Feb 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
So I get to Tokoyo and the machines show up and
I'm installing SunOS
and I have to name them:
3/260: BigTIT
3/50: LeftTIT
3/50: RightTIT
Back at UNSW/USyd we had some sypware (to keep an eye upon the kiddies
breaking SUID programs) named /etc/lefttit (the monitor) and /etc/righttit
(the reporting program); a bra was under construction...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
1 Feb
1 Feb
10:54 p.m.
On 2017-02-01 15:43, Michael Kjörling wrote:
Short of unimaginative things like calling my home
router IMP[2] or
things like that, can anyone either suggest names with a bit of
background (where they were, what hardware, what time period, etc.),
or point me toward online resources where I can find lists of those?
I could drop names, but at some point the labels became quite uniform.
To illustrate that, look at the labels in an old top1000 of USENET
sites.
http://top1000.anthologeek.net/2000/12/full.txt
They bore quickly.
The largest secondary tld nameserver ever was simply called ns
(ns.EU.net),
I don't recall the internal hostname, but it was probably some norse
god like balder or buri.
Some stuff that randomply pops up in my mind:
- anon and penet
Reference to anon.penet.fi, early to mid '90s, a generic 386/486 box at
Julfs house and at undisclosed locations later on.
Suitable for naming mail relays, outgoing mail servers and anonymity
realetd services.
- kremvax
Fictional machine. Suitable for jokes, routers related to anything in
the east.
- mcvax, mcsun
Suitable for anything related to europe.
- sunsite
A 90s thing. Suitable for sharing software, and, as a pun on Sun, java
related stuff maybe.
- gatekeeper
Again, labels became boring, ftp.uu.net was famous as ftp site, but
gatekeeper.dec.com had
a cool hostname.
- chronos
chronos.eu.net was a go to time server in europe, replaced by
rolex.ripe.net.
- agate
After agate.berkeley.edu, where BSD escaped the university until the
lawyers stepped in.
3 Feb
3 Feb
12:59 p.m.
I am not sure if I remember this or if I was told it later, but mcvax was a very important
machine for people in Europe (like me) as it was a big gateway (for usenet? I forget).
Its name was in lots of people's heads and probably lots of scripts &c. So at
some point they got a new machine which, obviously, was a Sun. So, at that point they had
two choices:
- keep the old name, even though it wasn't a VAX any more;
- rename it to something which was platform-neutral so the pain would only happen once.
And they took the third option: rename it, but wire-in the platform *again* thus causing
pain now and more pain later. Oh dear.
On the subject of hostnames, has anyone mentioned prep / prep.ai.mit.edu? All the GNU
software came from that in the mid 1980s, anyway. I think 'prep' meant
'document preparation', I don't know what it was.
--tim
On 1 Feb 2017, at 22:54, Jacob Goense
<dugo(a)xs4all.nl> wrote:
- mcvax, mcsun
Suitable for anything related to europe.
2:04 p.m.
On Wed, 1 Feb 2017, Jacob Goense wrote:
- kremvax
Fictional machine. Suitable for jokes, routers related to anything in the
east.
The most famous spoofed address would be moscvax!kremvax!kgbvax!gorby ...
I think KRE posted from there back one April 1st (alas, I never saved it).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
2:11 p.m.
On 2017-02-03 09:04, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Wed, 1 Feb 2017, Jacob Goense wrote:
Piet saved it at http://godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html
- kremvax
Fictional machine. Suitable for jokes, routers related to anything in
the
east.
The most famous spoofed address would be moscvax!kremvax!kgbvax!gorby
...
I think KRE posted from there back one April 1st (alas, I never saved
it). 
3:12 p.m.
owl% nslookup kremvax.demos.su
Server: 199.89.231.20
Address: 199.89.231.20#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: kremvax.demos.su
Address: 194.87.0.20
owl% whois -h whois.ripe.net 194.87.0.20
% This is the RIPE Database query service.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
% See http://www.ripe.net/db/support/db-terms-conditions.pdf
% Note: this output has been filtered.
% To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag.
% Information related to '194.87.0.0 - 194.87.3.255'
% Abuse contact for '194.87.0.0 - 194.87.3.255' is 'abuse(a)relcom.net'
inetnum: 194.87.0.0 - 194.87.3.255
netname: DEMOS-CORP
descr: DEMOS Corporate Network
descr: Demos Plus Co. Ltd.
descr: Moscow, Russia
country: RU
admin-c: DNOC-ORG
tech-c: DNOC-ORG
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: AS2578-MNT
created: 2002-05-24T05:47:32Z
last-modified: 2006-10-19T12:41:45Z
source: RIPE
http://kremvax.demos.su/
kremvax.demos.su
1992-1995-2016
R.I.P.
On 2/3/2017 9:11 AM, Jacob Goense wrote:
On 2017-02-03 09:04, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Wed, 1 Feb 2017, Jacob Goense wrote:
Piet saved it at http://godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html
- kremvax
Fictional machine. Suitable for jokes, routers related to anything
in the
east.
The most famous spoofed address would be moscvax!kremvax!kgbvax!gorby
...
I think KRE posted from there back one April 1st (alas, I never saved
it).
6 Feb
6 Feb
5:41 a.m.
On Fri, 3 Feb 2017, Jacob Goense wrote:
Piet saved it at http://godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html
Thank you! Thank you!
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
3 Feb
3 Feb
5:50 a.m.
By the way, telehack.com is a great place to discover historical
machines.
At first glance, it just appears to be a plain prompt with a few
commands and games available. But it's MUCH MORE than that, so stick it
out for a few minutes.
2641
days inactive
2646
days old
15 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
-
Arthur Krewat -
Clem Cole -
Dave Horsfall -
Jacob Goense -
Larry McVoy -
Lars Brinkhoff -
Michael Kjörling -
Steve Nickolas -
Tim Bradshaw