RickNel
Veteran Member
Yes, any system I want to network via Windows or Samba has to be named. That means any system that I might want to update from networked software. Originally, I name them for their hardware platform (iMacG3) or, if they are generic clones, for their purpose or location (Benchtop).
As the collection has grown, and as different systems have been upgraded with bigger hard drives and newer operating systems, I keep old installations on the replaced HDDs, so I am accumulating more "systems" than "computers".
Some of these systems, like an old Win98 installation and a MacOS 7 system, exist only on HDDs and might be plugged into different motherboards in different cases, depending what I am fooling with. I also have various Linux systems on USB sticks or USB HDDs, that might boot on any machine. So the network name needs to tell me what the software system is, not the hardware platform. New installation, new name. It's not very sentimental, sorry, but I just need to keep track of what I am doing.
The Windows SMB convention lets you nominate both "name" and "description" in different setup fields, but I never seem to be able to rely on which field will turn up as the network name in a Samba or Apple network discovery. I try to make them both distinctive - probably they should both be the same for sake of simplicity.
As the collection has grown, and as different systems have been upgraded with bigger hard drives and newer operating systems, I keep old installations on the replaced HDDs, so I am accumulating more "systems" than "computers".
Some of these systems, like an old Win98 installation and a MacOS 7 system, exist only on HDDs and might be plugged into different motherboards in different cases, depending what I am fooling with. I also have various Linux systems on USB sticks or USB HDDs, that might boot on any machine. So the network name needs to tell me what the software system is, not the hardware platform. New installation, new name. It's not very sentimental, sorry, but I just need to keep track of what I am doing.
The Windows SMB convention lets you nominate both "name" and "description" in different setup fields, but I never seem to be able to rely on which field will turn up as the network name in a Samba or Apple network discovery. I try to make them both distinctive - probably they should both be the same for sake of simplicity.
