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. |
