# Candidate name pool

Vetted Middle-earth names for homelab components, grouped by the kind of thing they suit.
Load this only when naming something the main registry does not already cover.

A name earns its place by **matching the component's role**, not by sounding good. Each
entry below carries the reasoning; if you cannot state the reasoning for a new name in one
sentence, it is the wrong name.

Nothing here is claimed. Claiming happens in `SKILL.md` → "Registry — reserved".

## Storage and persistence

| Name | Why it fits |
|---|---|
| `erebor` | **Claimed for the NAS.** The Lonely Mountain — the hoard in deep vaults. |
| `khazad-dum` | The vast delved halls; deeper and larger than Erebor. Suits archive or cold storage beneath the primary NAS. |
| `moria` | Same place, later and abandoned. Reads as decommissioned — good for an archive tier, bad for anything you want to trust. |
| `mathom-house` | The hobbit museum for things kept but not used. Backups, snapshots, retention. |

## Network edge and gateways

| Name | Why it fits |
|---|---|
| `argonath` | The Gates of Kings — the pillars marking the border, which everything entering the realm passes between. The strongest fit for a router/gateway. |
| `rammas-echor` | The outer wall encircling Gondor's fields. A perimeter firewall. Long to type. |
| `carrock` | The single stepping-stone crossing the river. A NAT or jump host. |
| `bruinen` | The ford that repels attackers at the border. A WAF or DDoS boundary. |
| ~~`outpost`~~ | **Do not use** — already ambiguous between the router and `gondor-ithilien-v1`. |

## Compute realms and clusters

| Name | Why it fits |
|---|---|
| `arnor` | **Reserved.** Gondor's northern sister-kingdom — a peer cluster or second site. |
| `rohan` | **Reserved.** The horse-lords — fast, mobile, ride to aid Gondor. Burst or ephemeral compute. |
| `lorien` | Timeless and preserved, outside the world's decay. A long-lived staging or golden-image environment. |
| `shire` | Small, comfortable, unbothered. A development or sandbox environment. |
| `isengard` | Industrial, mechanised, mass-producing. A build farm or CI fleet — with the obvious caveat that it goes rogue. |

## Cluster nodes (places within a realm)

Gondorian place names, for nodes under `gondor-v1`:

| Name | Why it fits |
|---|---|
| `osgiliath` | **In use** — the river crossing; control plane. |
| `minas-tirith` | **In use** — the fortress city; heavy workers. |
| `cair-andros` | The fortified island guarding the northern approach. Another worker or a quorum/witness node. |
| `pelargir` | The great port where supplies arrive. An ingress-heavy or storage-gateway node. |
| `dol-amroth` | The coastal princedom that sends its own knights. A semi-independent or specialised node pool. |
| `henneth-annun` | The hidden refuge behind the waterfall, in Ithilien. Fits something concealed under the edge — a bastion or VPN endpoint. |

## Observation, control, and tooling

| Name | Why it fits |
|---|---|
| `palantir` | **In use** — the seeing-stone; see the realm and act on it. Operator tooling. |
| `amon-hen` | The Hill of Sight — see far, but only see. Monitoring, metrics, dashboards; explicitly read-only, which is the useful distinction from `palantir`. |
| `beacon` | The chain of warning-fires from Gondor to Rohan. Alerting and paging. |
| `orthanc` | The tower from which Saruman watched and schemed. A control plane you do not fully trust — or simply a strong name for a scheduler. |

## Identity and secrets

| Name | Why it fits |
|---|---|
| `doors-of-durin` | Opens only to the one who speaks the word. Authentication, SSO, Keycloak. |
| `mellon` | The password to those doors. A secrets store or vault. |
| `mithril` | Rare, precious, protective. Certificate or key material. |

## Names to avoid

| Name | Why not |
|---|---|
| `mordor`, `barad-dur`, `sauron` | Adversary names. Funny once; confusing in an incident when someone asks whether Mordor is supposed to be down. |
| `gollum`, `smeagol` | Split identity, unreliable. Bad omen for anything stateful. |
| `one-ring`, `precious` | Single point of failure, corrupts its holder. Never name infrastructure this. |
| `outpost` | Ambiguous in this estate — see above. |
| `arda` | Reserved for the estate as a whole. Never a component. |