ZeroConf is a protocol that lets computers find each other automatically on a local network. In the typical configuration, if your computer is named “Jeff’s Mac”, it’s Zeroconf that makes your computer available for networking using the hostname jeffs-mac.local.
I have what I like to think is a normal number of Raspberry Pi computers around the house, doing Raspberry Pi type things. The Raspberry Pi runs Linux as its operating system, and on Linux the Zeroconf protocol is implemented using a software package called Avahi. Zeroconf makes it really easy to work with these tiny Linux computers: after you’ve picked a name (“blob” or “bouncingbeautiful”), you can then easily login to them later using a memorable hostname like blob.local or bouncingbeautiful.local.
But there’s a bug in Avahi, which sometimes leads to a conflict in how these computers are addressable: if your computer starts up as blob.local, an hour or so later it starts to think that someone else has claimed blob.local and it will automatically add a number to the name and adopt blob-1.local instead. Let this process run wild and pretty soon your computers are describing themselves as blob-17.local, blob-117.local or blob-550.local.
I’m sure this bug will be fixed eventually, but for now I’m enjoying this as a latter day computing equivalent of the old yellow pages naming strategy, where you’d name your business “AAAAA Business Name” to try to game the alphabetized sorting used in printed phone books. Here’s a nice description of that phenomenon, in the LA Times from 1993:
Bob Johnson, a listing service product manager for Pacific Bell, said that when companies wage war in the Yellow Pages to be the first listing in each specific category, the cumulative result is pages of A’s in the white pages.
Bob goes on to describe how their particular sorting algorithm ranked separate letters (“A A A”) higher than combined letters (“AAA”), for reasons which go unmentioned at the time. There’s a great quote from the business owner of “A Aaaaa Bcalvy 24 Hour Carpet Fire Carpet Water Damage Specialist”, who admits “it’s to get as near to the top of the category as possible”. Long live the power of suffixes and prefixes like these! We should all resist the tyranny of alphabetical sorting by adding some letters or numbers to the beginning or the end of our identifiers.