The Coolest Server NamesThis question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here.
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These days server naming is a bit of a lost art. Most large organizations don't allow for fanciful names and name their servers with jumbles of digits and letters. In the olden days just about every system administrator came up with a unique naming scheme, well, sometimes unique - many just settled for Star Trek characters.
To this day my favorite server name is Qantas - a Unix server that Joel Spolsky has or used to have. Why Qantas? You'd have to ask Rainman.
So my question is this - what is the coolest server name or naming convention that you encountered? Let the geekfest begin.
localhost and you'll never forget a server name again! - MattBianco
Elements of the periodic table. We also use the element number in the IP address, so
Hydrogen = 192.168.0.1
Helium = 192.168.0.2
etc.
The funniest server name story I have is from when I worked at the Kennedy Space Center. On our particular project, our main server was named snowwhite, and the 7 client workstations were named after the Seven Dwarves. The kicker is, one day one of our engineers ran into a Disney Imagineer who worked at Walt Disney World, and they started talking about server names. The Disney Imagineer said "that's funny, we have a group of servers named columbia, challenger, atlantis, and discovery."
Use Google Sets [1] to expand a list of a few items, into a list with many items. For example let's suppose you want a set (or list) of Star Wars characters, but can only think of a few. Enter a the ones you can think of, and Google sets will return a whole list of others you can use for server names.
Great way to get a list for server names!
[1] http://labs.google.com/sets
ACCEPTED]
One of my inventions, of which I was the most proud, was a server naming scheme I came up with at a previous employer. It was called the RFB scheme. We had a tradition in place of using rather tasteless humour for determining systemic nomenclatures. Previously, we'd employed a convention a friend of mine had suggested, using euphemisms for vomiting ( yak, ralph, hurl, chunder etc. ) but this had leaked up towards management who freaked that it might offend potential customers if the hostnames were somehow exposed, via mail headers or some such, and firmly suggested we change it to something tamer.
So we needed something innocuous, memorable, preferably with a payload of appropriately tasteless humour somehow opaque to everyone bar the tech ops. I remembered reading a list years previously, either on a BBS or USENET which I'd found morbidly amusing. Supposedly representative of a survey taken from Surgery magazine, of various objects removed from patients in emergency rooms, called the Rectal Foreign Bodies [1] list. It was perfect, even coming with its own snazzy sounding cryptic Three Letter Acronym. The RFB cluster was born.
This scheme was successfully deployed for a few years, I think without the management types ever cottoning on to just why these innocent, random sounding computer names used to elicit such childish smirking and nodding between members of their technical staff.
[1] http://www.well.com/~cynsa/newbutt.htmlUnix boxes named after Greek gods (Apollo, Zeus, etc.)
Windows machines named after Muppets (Fozzy, Beaker, etc.)
Why?
edit:
VMWare (and other Virtual Machines) can be named after "Undersea Volcanoes" like Loihi, They exist, but you can't see them without special equipment.
I thought of two different naming schemes this week for a situation where there are redundant servers with one at a primary datacentre and its doppleganger at a secondary datacentre. Each server would have a name that is related to its match.
The first idea was related car models:
Taurus / Sable
Cavalier / Sunfire
The problem there was deciding which was primary and which was secondary. A better (and more fun) solution was superheros and their secret identities:
Hulk / Banner
Spidey / Parker
Superman / Kent
Batman / Wayne
Robin / Grayson
Batgirl / Gordon
Tarzan / Greystoke
Robinhood / Loxley
It may be worth referring to RFC 1178 [1]- "Choosing a name for your computer":
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178Naming groups of machines in a common way is very popular, and enhances communality while displaying depth of knowledge as well as imagination. A simple example is to use colors, such as "red" and "blue". Personality can be injected by choices such as "aqua" and "crimson".
Certain sets are finite, such as the seven dwarfs. When you order your first seven computers, keep in mind that you will probably get more next year. Colors will never run out.
Some more suggestions are: mythical places (e.g., Midgard, Styx, Paradise), mythical people (e.g., Procne, Tereus, Zeus), killers (e.g., Cain, Burr, Boleyn), babies (e.g., colt, puppy, tadpole, elver), collectives (e.g., passel, plague, bevy, covey), elements (e.g., helium, argon, zinc), flowers (e.g., tulip, peony, lilac, arbutus). Get the idea?
We use Simpson names.
I try to match the name based upon what the server does or what it is made out of.
For instance, some health related servers are called DRNICK and DRHIBBERT.
We have a firewall... WIGGUM
Servers that do not behave properly... JIMBO and NELSON
I have one in a Spanish Speaking office... BUMBLEBEEMAN
I once worked at a place where we had a server called "YOURMOM".
The jokes were endless:
"I just turned on YOURMOM"
lots of jokes about forking and backing up as well.
Why, the poster asked for coolest, so here goes:
I use Shakespeare characters who eventually die.
I've used the seven deadly sins before
When I ran out, I continued on with the seven virtues
When I worked at Bellcore, the network servers all had names that matched *day. Sunday-Saturday were obvious. When they needed more servers, they added Payday, Faraday, and Oneaday.
One group used something akin to rejected names for the seven dwarfs (Grubby, Sleazy, Gropey...)
When they got a few brand spanking new NeXT boxes, they were named after polymers since there were like nothing else (Nylon, Rayon, Orlon, Dacron, Polyester).
There were some cartoon character names used for Sun workstations. This unfortunately led to some awkward conversations outside of work:
BC Worker: My Sun died this week.
Non-tech person: Oh! I'm so very sorry!
BC Worker: It's OK, I'm going to get another one and name him Bullwinkle.
Non-tech person: !!!
The most common name for a computer used to be elvis. This is because there was a tool which checked whether a computer was on-line, and when it was, it'd say "COMPUTERNAME is alive."
For a time, I used names of girls in famous songs:
We have a plan to change our build server to be "Bob the builder".
a, b, c, d, ...
:)
My university compsci lab had three unix boxes named Godel, Escher, & Bach.
You can use the Phonetic alphabet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
That way you can say "Charlie is down" or "Alpha has some problems with its disk"
at one job we had a major client who was a liquor distributor, and one of the managers was a drinker who would have a scotch or three every day at 5. So I named his workstation 'scotch'. As time went on we ended up with
It was a boozy time.
I name my servers after the Muppets.
I like systems that have a natural number-to-naming relationship, like the periodic table. Lots of cool names, and you can figure out IP addresses even when DNS is down (if you remember your chemistry).
There are other lists that work this way (50 states, US presidents, etc.), but the names aren't as cool.
All of our servers follow a pattern of outmoded women's names.
Additional suggestions? I'd love to hear them.
Being in Scotland one company I used to work for used to use Lochs for unix servers and rivers for Windows servers. They had a list of all such in the country which was of a pretty usable length and all worked fine until one day I dropped in a new server and got told it would be called
THE
Which apparently is a sea loch in Shetland. The computer manager in charge was particularly aspergerish and couldn't see what was wrong with it - although after a month of referring to the The server he was finally convinced that maybe it wasn't such a good idea.
One place I used to work used Star Wars characters (there are thousands). It was a large company and so there was some initial competition over who got DARTH_VADER (the CEO), and DARTH_MAUL (the CFO) but eventually it settled down. When the time came to name the crash and burn test server which would get every evil piece of hackery thrown at it and need continuous rebuilding there was only one possible answer: JAR_JAR.
Happy days...
The AI entities from Deus Ex [1]: Daedalus, Icarus, Helios, and Morpheus.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_exCharacters from Battlestar Galactica:
etc...
I use George Carlin's naughty words.
Vogon
Pokemon. They have official numbers. At the time, it made more sense because there were 251 of them, which was almost 256. Now there are even more more [1]. (follow link for full numbered list)
bulbasaur 10.0.0.1 (server)
pikachu 10.0.0.25 (laptop)
etc...
Funniest name? Elvis. Why? Vell, if there is a machine called elvis in the network, try this in Solaris:
$ ping elvis
elvis is alive
I name all my computers after fictional (and occasionally non-fictional) computers. My main server is called "hal", while my laptop is "
lal
[1]". I have a gateway computer named "rosie", an old desktop named "marvin", etc. I used to have a laptop named "
turing
[2]", but not enough people would get the joke. :-)
For the ultimate in weird puns, my sister named her laptop "
majel
[3]".
Futurama characters. Fry, Leela, Zoidberg, Hermes, Farnsworth, Scruffy. sniff Scruffy believes in this company.
The 88 Constellations as defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU):
Andromeda
Antlia
Apus
Aquarius
Aquila
Ara
Aries
Auriga
Boötes
Caelum
Camelopardalis
Cancer
Canes Venatici
Canis Major
Canis Minor
Capricornus
Carina
Cassiopeia
Centaurus
Cepheus
Cetus
Chamaeleon
Circinus
Columba
Coma Berenices
Corona Australis
Corona Borealis
Corvus
Crater
Crux
Cygnus
Delphinus
Dorado
Draco
Equuleus
Eridanus
Fornax
Gemini
Grus
Hercules
Horologium
Hydra
Hydrus
Indus
Lacerta
Leo
Leo Minor
Lepus
Libra
Lupus
Lynx
Lyra
Mensa
Microscopium
Monoceros
Musca
Norma
Octans
Ophiuchus
Orion
Pavo
Pegasus
Perseus
Phoenix
Pictor
Pisces
Piscis Austrinus
Puppis
Pyxis
Reticulum
Sagitta
Sagittarius
Scorpius
Sculptor
Scutum
Serpens
Sextans
Taurus
Telescopium
Triangulum
Triangulum Australe
Tucana
Ursa Major
Ursa Minor
Vela
Virgo
Volans
Vulpecula
Suggestions:
Names of demons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_demons)
Names of assistant secretaries in the Eisenhower administration
For fans of Neal Stephenson (as long as you only have 2 servers): "Inner Qwghlm" and "Outer Qwghlm"
I name my computers at home after famous mathematicians:
etc.
In our team we all became addicted to the tv show LOST [1], so we decided to name our new servers this way:
The next one will be Desmond.
BTW, I forgot to type in the numbers: 4 8 15 16 23 42
[1] http://www.lostpedia.com/At a company I worked, we called the servers after an "Asterix" scheme (the comic book). Note: This is more funny if you can read German :)
Rule: The name should put a grin on your face when you need to login.
We started by naming our servers after Planets and moons.
And finally the best name of all time Uranus, getting calls about this server at 2 AM was hilarious.
After getting bored with that we starting making domains and each had a theme, and we would get bonus points if you could extend a name into another domain.
Then we expanded to:
Probably one of the funnest parts of that job
At home we name all our boxes after scientists (more-or-less):
For what it's worth...
Oh, and my cellphone is Heisenberg. Guess why?
When we first got a unix server (SCO unix probably), long before I started here, someone without much imagination named it engu, for engineering unix.
So when we then got a linux server, pingu seemed the obvious choice.
Since then our naming scheme for linux servers has been that they have to end with u, so we have vishnu, haiku, kungfu, irnbru and best of all snafu. As there aren't many good words that actually end in u, we've had to mis-spell a few things to fit, so there's a waterlu and a corkscru. And there used to be a linux laptop called portalu.
We name everything after transformers. For the most part this is good except that we have at least 4 machines which start with 'sky'. It can be confusing.
Once I worked in a place I hated I was going to leave soon, and a bunch of servers arrived. I called them using names that already have a meaning but don't necessarily reflect what the computers actually were
Lets see.
Back in my university days, characters from Lord of the Rings were popular:
I myself have used "computers from Red Dwarf":
And also popular are the Muppets:
-R
p.s. I always wanted to use computer names from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", but then there were only really a couple of good computer names, the best being, of course, "Deep Thought". And, of course, Marvin. ;-)
I go for South Park characters at home:
My Windows machine is Butters
My wife's laptop is Ike
My son's computer is Kyle
My Linux machine is Timmy (Timmy is pieced together from pieces of Cartman and Stan - who had to be retired)
How about things not to name servers? At one point all of our server names were Klingon.
When I started at the company there was an instance where I needed to go into the server physically find a server. It was difficult to understand Qlyah versus Quvalth over the noise of the server room while someone gave me directions over the phone. It is also annoying to try to remote into a server if you have to look up how to spell its name. I have been told that is my fault for not thinking in IP addresses.
We used WOT for our servers - some or all of:
I once named a server 'pong' just so I'd have an excuse to type 'ping pong' from a command prompt. That alone brought me more amusement than any other server name I encountered.
A close second would probably be the company where we named all servers after sea creatures (a naming convention that was in place before I worked there). We had an extremely old server set up to accept incoming fax calls and forward the transmission as an attachment in an email. It was so slow during setup that it proved to be annoying. We named it 'deadfish'.
Here is a wiki which has just skads of server names: http://namingschemes.com/Main_Page
Naming conventions risk to be finite? What is non-numerable? What is simple to everyone to be associated to an IP number?
Mumble mumble ... And it hat to be cool too, and it would be cool it would be exotic too ...
mumble ..
1, 2, 3, ....
mumble mumble !
Names have to be short enough, it should be simple to name hundreds of machines ...
Chinese numbers!!! Yea, it is cool, it is simple to scale, I love its shortness:
Ling: 0
Yi: 1
Er: 2
San: 3
Si: 4
Wu: 5
Liu: 6
Qi: 7
Ba: 8
Jiu: 9
Shi: 10
Shi Yi: 11
Shi Er: 12
Yi Bai: 100
Yi Bai Er Shi San: 123
Yi Qian: 1000
Er Qian Qi: 2007
It is very very simple to be learned, and it is really cool to me :)
Well I did not see this one.
We use Transformer names at our small ISP/Hosting Co.
Optimus and Megatron = Primaries
Metroplex = database
starscream/skywarp = nix servers
bumblebee/ironhide = win servers
soundwave = media/content server
ratchet = backup
The best I've ever seen was at an Apple store. They had named and labeled all of their equipment after Arrested Development characters. The two machines I noticed were Bob Loblaw and Maeby.
We used to use strip clubs
At my previous job we had a machine called 'switch'. (Really drove one of the sysadmins up the wall, that one.) We also had a firewall called asbestos, which I thought was quite apt.
Chess grand masters
and without there's plenty of great characters after these: Anand, Spassky, Tal, Lasker....
Colossus and Guardian, of course. That way the martians can't take our water!
We use characters from The Big Lebowski.
Currently we have:
My university comp sci lab named its machines after London Underground stations:
I've named my home computers after places from Middle Earth (LOTR). It looks so cool when I see my prompt as:
frodo@mordor:~>
aragorn@rohan:~>
gandalf@isengard:~>
At home all our computers and geeky devices are named after artificial intelligences: Wintermute, Neuromancer, Mother, Father, Bomb 20, Red Queen, but my most favorite is Fine Till You Came Along, the name of a mind ship in an Iain Banks science fiction novel.
At work we use the names of the districts in Frankfurt, like Bornheim, Niederrad, Harheim etc., but I think that's boring. At a previous employer at least all computers were named after Indian gods.
Much cooler is the naming scheme at a friend's company where all servers have names from gods in H.P. Lovecraft novels, like Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, or Yog-Sothoth. Their name server is aptly named Alhazred. ;)
We had a beer theme going our QA lab for awhile: BUD, GUINNESS, LAGER, STOUT, HANGOVER...
Names i choose are mostly words taken from songs in my current playlist. My favourite computer names (in bold below) come from Led Zeppelin songs. I have used other bands too, though. Not an ideal scheme if you've dozens of computers to name :-)
One company I worked at used Civil War generals. Anything public-facing was a Union general, and anything internal was Confederate.
Clever, and made you learn your U.S. history.
On a U.S. Navy project, we had to create over 200 names for a bunch of unix workstations and servers, each 8 or less characters in length. I found a book on fish names.
tuna carp rockfish sunfish mackerel
etc.
My favorite, which was my workstation, was: soapfish
It sure beat wstn1, wstn2,...
I name servers by my favorite video game characters
etc. Also note the intentional, exclusive use of Nintendo characters :-)
It rains allot in Seattle. We use different types of rain. If you lived in Alaska different types of snow would be appropriate.
Server01 ;)
The last time I had to install an entire lab of machines, we went with Babylonian gods (Greek and Roman being too overused, we figured.)
We named the server Gozer.
my brotherlaw works in the US branch of a large Japanese company and they name all their servers after sashimi:
toro, hamachi, unagi, ebi etc..
The SysEng department at my first job was into the Divine school of naming:
Production: Nordic Gods, internally knows as valhalla.example.com
Staging: Greek gods, at olympus.example.com
Admin Stuff: Egyptian gods, at duat.example.com
Development: Hindu gods - Shiva - Ganesha - etc.
On the other hand, PCs and laptops have uninteresting names.
One of my favorites for which I cannot take credit: Name them after sounds:
...
My personal boxes and VM instances are named after characters in Animaniacs:
More here [1]
[1] http://namingschemes.com/Cartoon%5FCharactersMy favorite server name? "Paddy".
You might wonder why, so here's the first hint: The share name was "GiveADogABone".
And to spell it out, you'd find the software at \paddy\giveadogabone, which is pronounced "whack, whack, paddy, whack, giveadogabone".
Now that is inventive geek humor. :)
via
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=29370&cid=3155380 [1]
A:Boot up?
B:Which server?
A:Up.
B:Up who?
A:The server.
B:Which?
A:Boot up.
B:Boot up what server?
A:No no what server should stay up!
B:I don't know.
A:No no that's our web server.
B:Your web server is "I don't know"?
A:Yes. But nevermind, we need to boot up.
B:What server?
A:What server should stay up.
B:I'm ASKING YOU THAT! WHAT SERVER SHOULD STAY UP?
A:Certainly.
B:Oh at last! So certainly should stay up. Ok, so I should boot what server?
A:No no no, what server should stay up!
B:Certainly.
A:OK, so now boot up!
B:AAAAARGH! What does that server do?
A:It's a mail server.
B:So, what you get mail what server does it say in the headers it's from?
A:No no, what server's our web server. It says it's from up.
B:What do you mean up? Mail can't come from up!
A:It can if it's our mail server.
B:You're mail server is called "it" and it should boot it up?
A:No no no! It's our DNS server! We should be booting up!
B:So we should be booting it up?
A:No. We should be booting up.
B:THAT'S WHAT I SAID!
Which is of course based on
Who's on First [2]
[1] http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=29370&cid=3155380Due to a long-running joke with a friend, all of my Linux servers (I use a lot of VMs) are named after Russian leaders like Stalin, Lenin, Malenkov, etc. Windows servers are named after American Presidents.
The two groups are divided into two network segments - 'USSR' and 'USA', and the small VM server that houses the Linux guests is called Kremlin, while the one that is used for the Windows guests is called Whitehouse.
Any VM servers after that will be called Kremlin2, etc, etc.
The proxy server is called "Iron Curtain"
http, ping, ssh, etc.
"Just ssh to http!"
I deal with a number of small businesses that have 5-10 PCs.
I've used a variety of naming schemes
gems: Ruby, Emerald, Topaz,...
gases: hydrogen, argon, oxygen, helium
colours: green, blue, silver, purple
elements: carbon, graphite, iron, lead
Names need to related to function
Ebola - Antivirus server
James & Bond - Clustered Exchange Server
Ant & Dec - Clustered NLB web servers
Hochimin - Database server in the DMZ
Leela - Star wars Trinity - Matrix Z, Orac - Blake 7 Mulder & Scully - Unix servers VirtualTom, VirtualJerry - VMware ESX servers
Naming becomes difficult when you have more than 10 or so servers. What I've done in the past is give unique names to systems with specific duties, things like backup servers, mail servers, etc. The bulk of the systems get a location based prefix and a number. It makes scripting changes to the systems and keeping track of what you have much easier when you know you want to apply it to sea-001 thru sea-102 instead of remembering you ran out of Disney characters and switched to Firefly.
Musicians:
After we had Kermit, someone continued that riff into the Muppets and we ended up with:
We sometimes use some names from the Asterix comics like
Rocky
Bullwinkle
MrPeabody
Boris
Natasha
Sherman
I had a gateway once that I named "Zuul".
At my previous job as a programmer with the genetic development division of a large pork production company:
In one of the labs at INPE (Brazil's National Institute for Spacial Research) the servers were named after Scottish distilleries: Oban, Glenvilet, Lagavulin, etc.
Some of the machines had a (empty) bottle of the product over it.
Odin and Thor from Norse mythology ... and final fantasy kinda ( Odin )
Named them after UK rivers ... well I was working for the National River Authority
clusterfuck - not sure what this server does, maybe part of a cluster?
I like using fast-food menu items like bigmac, crunchwrap, chillicheese, whopper, etc
At home I use greek and ancient mythology.
My iMac is Deadalus.
My Macbook is Icarus.
My iPod Nano was called Prometheus (I like the irony of that one) which was then adopted by my iPhone.
My external drive is Medusa and my TimeMachine drive is (cunningly) called Chronos.
At my parents house I set up all their systems with surnames from The West Wing so Bartlett, Lyman, Cregg, Ziegler etc.
The coolest names are to be found in Greek mythology, Norse mythology and astronomy.
Code name for my current project: "Orion"
We've got a bunch of Russians and Poles in our company, and we've settled on Slavic women's names. The great thing about this scheme, is that Polish is a declined language, so you can name backups/devs with declined versions of the other one's names.
Production: anna Dev: ania
Deepblue - named after the IBM chess supercomputer, of course.
They don't really allow it any more, but for a long time my server was named 'SpeedRacer'. The reason was that I work for Intel and my server always had the fastest pre-production chip that I could get my hands on.
The desktop background image was a nice pic of Mach 1.
My coworker learned of my server name, so he called his box 'RacerX'.
I personally prefer to use parts of quotes
For example my hostnames are as follows:
Desktop - allyourbase Laptop - arebelong NintendoDS - tous
We used to name our workstations after breakfast cereal and our servers after Harry Potter characters.
At a small agency I worked for back in the dot.com days we named our servers after quarks.
Thus our file server and its mirrored backup were TRUTH and BEAUTY, because after all "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
And our web server and its mirrored backup were UP and DOWN. Unfortunately I never got the chance to say to my boss that, due to a server crash "UP was down, but don't worry because DOWN is up."
CHARM and STRANGE were never used as we ran out of money before we needed them.
We finally settled on Scottish Castles:
http://namingschemes.com/Scottish_Castles
Partly due to the fact that their is so many to choose from, and partly because the MD is Scottish.
Over at NeXT they used to name their machines after stars, at least in the training rooms. One place I worked at in Mexico City, we named the servers after Aztec and Maya cities, and started taking names from other pre-hispanic cultures cities and places as well (Tenochtitlan, Tula, Teotihuacan, Tulum, Aztlan, etc). Later on a different branch of that same company I named the machines after musicians: gilmour, waters, mason, wright, barrett, peart, lifeson, bowie, hendrix, page, plant, bonham, etc.
But a very cool name I can remember off the top of my head right now was simply Wintermute.
It may not be terribly unique, but my company is using starship names for computers. Starships tend to have names that sound appropriate for naming machines:
My personal computers are named after video game characters, so far:
The characters from Hong Kong Phooey, including a database called the Phooeymobile.
We have a great naming convention.
Our production is named 'SQLSERVER'. Our development is named 'DevServer'. Our reports, which is a copy from yesterdays production is named 'RPTSqlServer'.
The creativity abounds from there.
Geeky, but an endless supply -
Star Trek Races [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_planetsWe use german names of women, which starts mit s. For example: Susi, Sylvia, Steffi, Simone etc :-)
It sounds funny, if you say something like: susi isn*t working anymore, maybe she is falling asleep.
We use supermodels
and others
I used to work at a place that named their Freebsd jails after real jails
At Uni we had a room full of Sun Ultra10s that formed the Unix lab. All were named after various rocks and minerals - Graphite, Stone, Quartz, Anthracite, etc. The room was known as the "Rocks Room".
The reason for this was so the admins could stick a sign on the door reading "Unix Rocks".
I like having more rules, it makes the process challenging. We use alphabetical four-letter villains. We had pre-existing schemes that we wanted to work around (alphabetically), so we had to leave gaps.
Well, I don't know who's going to plow through 14 pages of these to find this answer, but here goes....
I named the PCs on my home network after founders of religions:
Future names:
Futurama characters!
Pokemons.
The Windows-based servers are named after Pokemons that tend to be bad: Seviper, Carnivine, Zangoose, etc. The other servers are named after Pokemons that tend to be good: Pikachu, Pachurisu, etc.
Also, our first virtual host was named after a Pokemon region, called Sinnoh. On Sinnoh, you could find Seviper, Pikachu, etc. A new mail server had to be named after Dragonite, who apparently was a messenger. Makes a weird kind of sense.
Once named a source code server "fire" so that whenever anybody might ask where the source files were, I could say, "they're on fire." Thought about naming some others "acid," "coke," "speed," etc, but thought better of it.
Guns!
Colt, Beretta, Browning, Smith, Springfield, Walther, Weatherby, Glock, Ruger...so on and so forth....
I currently use Bible prophets to name my machines. For example, I have Jonah and Ezra. I used to use Narnia characters before, such as Aslan and Caspian.
Mario Bad Guys: Shyguy, Bowser, KingKoopa, RedKoopa, BlueKoopa, etc
I was in a lab that had "This" and "That" eventually, we got a third machine which became "Other" when we got a 4th machine, I lobbied hard for "AndThe" but the admins wouldn't hear of it. They did let us name it "Andy" so we had This, That, Andy, Other....
I worked for a place where one guy was really pleased he'd called a server 'Pants'. "I'm taking pants down!" "Pants is going down!"
Never got old.
Oh yeah - another scheme we had for a short time (ran out of names too quick) was cars that are also porn star names.
E.g. sierra, porsche etc. Also many of our central services machines are in a sub domain called services, so there was an escort.services..
We mainly use pretty boring names, most servers are named after function or OS, however we have one server, used for internal monitoring, which I took the liberty of naming "Panopticon".
We use the first two or three syllables of dinosaurs and group functions by family (and sometimes order). For example, the outward-facing servers are all named after pelycosaursia [1]:
(Although, pelycosaurs aren't dinosaurs, the dinosaurs descend from them.)
The salespeople have machines named after tyrannasauridae [2]:
The developers are named after coelophysoidea [3]:
There are other categories too for accounting, executives and the like.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PelycosaurIn the mid-90s, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro [1], the Unix machines were named after the African Orisha deities [2]: Shango, Oshumare, Eshu etc. (Actually the Portuguese spellings: Xango, Oxumare, Exu.) These names may persist to this day, I don't know.
A bit of a Take That [3] perhaps?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifical_Catholic_University_of_Rio_de_JaneiroAnd if you need more inspiration: http://www.namingschemes.com/
At some point early on, didn't everyone name a pair of relatd servers Calvin and Hobbes.
Not a lot of room for growth though.
I name my servers after Rush songs :-)
I name clients after South Park characters
and of course:
The proper IP address for Jenny would, of course, be 86.75.30.9...
I use Star Wars planets for my home network. I worked at a place that used the names of Biblical women, including a few of the lesser-known names such as Jael. Also attended a college where the workstations in the math department were named after nuts (peanut, brazil, walnut, etc.). Last place I worked used car makes and models.
Over the years, I've been on networks that have used:
My home machines are all adverbs (slightly, extremely, somewhat, mostly), which is only funny with the domain name (annoying.org).
We use toxins for servers and workstations (dioxin, ethion, nitrofen, anthrax etc.). Mac-workstations are named after deadly diseases (motaba, lassa etc)... the network is called toxine.lan
The University of Waterloo Computer Science Club used the ingredients from a can of Coke while I was there. It must have changed by now since we bought caffeine just before I left.
The only workplace I've had that used interesting names used hockey players for a bunch of common machines, so you would get to say that you had reserved Howe for an hour :)
at home I decided to opt for solar system planets, even going so far as to name hard drives as the moons. so the DHCP router is 'sol' and of course wife's machine is Venus, NAS is Pluto (since it's not really a planet), and the domain name is 'Milkyway'. When ever I need to expand past 9 machines I just add a new domain.
At my university we used to use standard household appliances. So if I wanted to fire up my own HTTP proxy, I'd log onto dishwasher, to upload my comp sci homework, I'd log onto the eggbeater.
At a law firm, a good naming mechanism is to use famous supreme court cases. Of course, this is only useful if you buy your servers in even numbered sets so that "Marbury" can have a "Madison" and "Plessy" can have a "Ferguson."
We have 3 racks with related names, one was already listed: Snow White and the 7 dwarves We also have a LOTR (Land of the Rings) Rack, with Gandalf, Frodo, Bilbo etc and the third is the Borg rack, 0of9 thru 9of9, so named by a former employee so that one of the servers would be named 7of9
At the last place I worked, all our machines were named after composers, so we had Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Josquin, and a dozen others.
When our servers started hosting multiple VMs, they took the naming convention of Band -> Members, so we had Beatles, with VMs John, Paul, George and Ringo, with each new server being a different band.
That was kinda cool.
At my University we have a research lab called "espresso" that deals with agile development and software engineering.
The computers there are named after various types of coffees, espressos and beans such as "affogato", or "doppio".
At home we use characters from Blackadder...
My PC is Edmund. My wife's is Baldrick (her choice). The firewall is Ploppy (the jailor). There are two servers called Queenie and Percy and a NAS box called Melchett. The wireless modem is called Flashheart.
An ISP that I worked for briefly had the following server-naming strategy...
apparently the scheme had been in place for a few years before the last condition was appended....
Damn political correctness. :(
greek words, mythical characters
I personally use bladed instruments: sickle, scramasax, scalpel, etc
In a big energy company where we did some jobs they use grape varieties like "beltour" and "pinot"...
Cheers from Argentina! PS. by the way we have some of the best wines in the world! you must try them!
I've seen a lot of naming schemes.
one machine (back in the early 80s) that had four huge disk drives named John, Paul, George and Ringo.
Another that was the departmental machine for the Marlborough plant - was named MRVAX (as MR was the building code). When they got another machine to offload some of the work, they names it, you guessed it, MRSVAX.
At home, Apollo is my main PC, Hermes is my laptop, Bacchus is my daughter's PC, Frankenstein is my home-built Windows Home Server box and Hollywood is the home theater PC I'm building. (My old laptop was Mercury, when we first put a network in the house, the old PC that had died and been rebuilt was named Lazarus).
I used to have quite a few servers named after Chapter Houses in the Dune series. Now my servers are named after medieval items vaguely describing use:
Beers.
SQL Servers would get named for barleywines.
App servers would get classified by the department they supported: Finance/Control: pale ales Marketing: domestics etc.
At university, back in the late 80:ies, we got this new room filled with sun workstations, it was something like 30 of them or so...
The room itself was called "Svart sal" (swedish for "black room") and all the workstations had the name "black", but in all different languages, ie
I still think that "black" is the word I can translate to most different languages :-)
Ofc, there were small name plates explaining what language was used etc.
Being something of a "chile-head", mine are named after peppers. So far I have:
A former business partner used spices - BASIL, OREGANO, etc.
Labotomy was one of my best ones.
I always name them after islands, since every computer is an island...or??
I have used a wide variety of computer/peripheral naming conventions over the years, and I have always preferred pronounceable names as well. I have used names from various mythos (Greek, Roman, Norse, etc.). I have used planets. I have used characters from a wide variety of movies, shows, series as well. For example, I named my personal computers and peripherals after cartoon characters for a long time: Taz, Tweety, Sylvester, Bugs, Daffy, Yosemite, etc.
However, I have always been frustrated when running out of names too quickly, especially when I started using virtual machines (VMs) a lot.
I started using mountains, but I found the list of usable names to be too short, and many of the names are too hard to type or pronounce.
Now I use the names of stars--there is a nice list on Wikipedia for reference, and there are LOTS of them that are usable.
So now I have Andromeda, Vega, etc.
I build my own servers from spare parts for personal use. I always name them after lengthy synonyms for 'bad' combined with the word 'box'. It's currently the terribox.
I always use planets or other objects from the Dune (By Frank & Brian Herbert) series of novels.
Currently, my servers include:
And I once had these:
We use drug names for lab server: cocaine, ecstasy, cannabis, lsd... etc. I remember laughing when cust was setting up firewall rules and said "I have a hit from cocaine". Also it sounds funny: I will set it up on cocaine.
Recent favorites : 9 loadbalanced webservers - The Fellowship of the Ring 2 database servers - White and Black [Towers] My ex-boss was a LOTR geek.
Here we set a rule - no server with a name longer than 5 characters. (You ARE typing it in a lot.) Mason builds code, Mule crunches numbers, Preon is the dev server [building blocks], etc.
We got 4 new boxes for continuous integration and named them after the card suites
we put the ten of each suit on the boxes.
The building host became joker
I've seen various ones, most have been mentioned except dance music DJs.
My Windows server, being a Microsoft product and therefore able to be used for good or evil, was naturally named WOPR [1].
When I later added a Mac Pro tower, to differentiate it from the other Macs on the LAN, I named it BIGMAC.
It was several days later that I noticed the nutritionally-challenged name convention I'd inadventantly adopted!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOPRFirst batch was all psychological states (e.g. Envy, Dismal, Desire)
Next batch was colors (Green, Puce, Clear)
Current one is spices for all the guest machines and herbs for all the Hyper-V hosts.
Wow -- I'm shocked to see, or in this case not see, any StarTrek --
Main corporate uses the planets -- (pretty much all of them, with a few moons too) Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and even the controversial Pluto -- guess which one is the FILE server, which ones are the virtual servers, and which one is our gateway :)
Just in case you are wondering, the backup server is Uranus for obvious reasons. Also makes for interesting tech support calls when users are instructed to go retrieve their latest backup.
Oh, and R&D uses Starfleet -- we have Q, TheBorg, DS9. DeltaFlyer, etc … guess which one is the build server and which is the knowledge base...
At a past job there was a server named "Deepthought." This happened to be the server guests used when they visited, resulting in many obvious mispronunciations which always caused numerous smirks around the office.
Many years ago we were running a small remote office on a Lantastic peer-to-peer network that consisted of a file server and seven worstations. Naturally the file server was "ShowWhite" and each workstation was named after a dwarf.
What makes this funny was that I could swear the workstation names perfectly matched up to the user at that desk "Grumpy, Sleepy, etc."
We use level names of the game 'Call of Duty United Offensive' as computer names:
I had a huge server at home (well huge at the time, it had two Pentium Pros in it, and a Gigabyte HDD the size of a brick!) I named it BigBertha.
At university we had machines with 2 quad cores called octopus1 to octopus9, the one that controlled them was called zoo.
My favorite server names were Pokemon. The development server was pikachu. ("Pikachu! I choose you!") We also had charmander and bulbasaur. A server that served only as a file transfer DMZ type server (and hence didn't have much to do) got the name snorlax. Only the sysadmin and I actually liked this scheme. Yes, we both had young sons.
Cool names only make sense when you have just a few that do the same thing.
It makes sense to call your servers/pcs by using the os, main use, application and a number.
So you would name :
The names give you an idea about what the server does.
I name my Linux boxes after "good" Harry Potter characters and my Windows boxes after "Evil" HP characters. So far I've used:
Hagrid, Hedwig, Arthur, Albus
and
Cornelius, Malfoy and Crabbe
I used to have an alphabetical list of Simpson's characters: Apu Bart ... etc.
That was my list of server names. I just went down the list, checking them off as we used them. ... and yes, I had all 26 letters represented. Xuxa was the hardest.
There is a quad proc server in our CS department called quadfather. I also enjoy the name we gave our 400-core opteron cluster, bmf. Bioinformatics Modeling Facility (aka Big Mother Fucker)
In a startup company around 1995/96 we named our first two servers Sodom and Gomorrah.
After 3 years the company was sold when there were around 250 employees.
Today the company doesn't exist anymore. So does Sodom and Gomorrah.
My personal machines are named after characters the protagonists in "Waiting for Godot" and "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead." If I ever get over 4 machines running then I will probably switch over to the 7 Endless from "The Sandman"
A company I used to work for named all their servers after the different types of pizza available at the nearby restaurant. They had lots of types, so it worked well for quite a while.
I live in Orlando a few miles from Walt Disney World, so my Dell XPS 1710 is named "ZipADeeDooDell"
Funny you should ask that; I just had to come up with a name for 200 machines. Boss wanted something serious, so I used WP's list of traditional star names [1], cut a few that were too long.
Also, I had ordered a server but the purchases dept lost it or ate it or something twice in a row, so I named the machine godot [2], for obvious reasons.
(By the way, have you people donated to WP [3]? Time to think about it! You know you use it.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_traditional_star_namesWe named our automated build server MrBuild. When the nightly build is broken we can exclaim "oh no! Mr Build!!"
I worked at a company with servers named after stars and planets. We had a lot of fun with the server named "uranus".
Like "I'm going to boot uranus" "Looks like uranus is full again" "What's the throughput of uranus?" and on and on...
192.168.0.1 = Spock
At one place I worked we used the names of Norse gods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_gods
Growing up, we named the computers in our home network after the last names of Star Trek actors that begin with S. We used Shatner, Stewart, Spiner and Sirtis. If we'd needed more we could have done Shultz, Siddig and Shimerman.
At work, our production servers are named after characters and objects from Gilligan's Island. No server is named after Gilligan himself; we felt it would be bad mojo. One server was named Ginger because she had, uh, two big drives.
Servers in our office are named after middle names of employees, especially if they're embarrassing.
At home I have two servers with actual names:
At work we have a lot of servers with weird task-based or project-based names followed by a number. An example would be isaserv02 or printsrv06.
Where I work both servers have relly boring names, but all workstations are named after comics super heroes. Whenever a new station needs naming, we have a brainstorming session to pick the right name
I tend to name my own computers after other fictional computers: Wintermute, ORAC, Slave... but I appear to be naming my remote servers after spices right now: coriander, cumin, turmeric, paprika, etc.
I use characters from the novels of Robert Heinlein:
Lazarus Friday Athene Dora Minerva
Minerva and Athene (Tena) were computers who migrated to human form, hopefully mine aren't planning the same :)
We picked out a numbering system that made sense for us. Listed below was our one-location usage. Once multiple locations are involved, just add to the numbering system. May not be the 'coolest' names to brag about; nonetheless, gets the job done and makes things easier when you have a lot of servers. No need to have brainstorming/political meetings about naming a new server.
mail servers m1.mydomain.com, m2.mydomain.com, so forth...
app servers a1.mydomain.com, a2.mydomain.com, so forth...
database servers db1.mydomain.com, db2.mydomain.com, so forth...
I like using a theme for the entire network. Say birds ware the names of the clients, names like Golden_Eagle, Bald_Eagle, Eagle_Hawk, etc. The sever would be named Eagles_Nest or some such name, while the network would be Blue_Sky.
Olympus, Ares, Apollo, Hera (Any names from Greek mythology)
I use symbolically loaded terms from the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. So far I have Scarlet and Brand. The next box I build will be Rappaccini. I also have a pre-naming-scheme box called Molly after the post-singularity being from Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines [1].
[1] http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0140282025My file servers are Armory and Battery, my desktop is Station, my laptop "reborn" from two busted laptops is Fawkes.
I've also used MrWorkstation and MrServer before.
Development servers from 10 years ago...
Austin
SCOTT!
AlottaFagina
DrEvil
MrBigglesworth
At the University of Buffalo, all the terminals and workstations are named after characters from Shakespearean plays. You would sit down to macbeth.buffalo.edu, othello.buffalo.edu, mercutio.buffalo.edu, brutus.buffalo.edu and so forth.
In my university's CS department, each lab has a naming scheme. I think the graduate lab is Lord of the Ring characters, another is bands/musicians, and so on.
I name all the servers for characters and place names in Shakespeare... I use Hamlet most of all... DC is Elsinore, and I have Hamlet, Horatio, Macbeth, Othello, Ophelia, Laertes, Gertrude, Polonius, Fortinbras... I also use characters from Greek myth: Achilles, Atreides, Hector, etc...
You could use Dickens, or Tolkien, or any number of other prolific authors as a general theme...
At home I use Wizard type names, Merlin, Talesian, Morganna, Circe and Simon for the computers, demons/devils for hard drives. I'm still waiting to commission a Rincewind :)
Halo 3 map names would be cool.
blackout guardian highground epitaph foundry epilogue valhalla
At home we used to name our PCs after one of the brand names printed on there, so the P100 with a KTX monitor became 'Katie', my old Hewlett Packard machine, 'Huey', the Leo brand monitor... 'Leo', the Likom, 'Likky', and so on.
Made it real easy to identify which machine you were talking about.
partybutt is the best name
Nothing like beer names :)
Ive used beaches in New Zealand i.e
In a law office, I used supreme court chief justices [1], in the order of their service.
(If it wasn't such a small office, I would have not limited it to chief justices, but since it was so small, I did.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%5Fof%5FJustices%5Fof%5Fthe%5FSupreme%5FCourt%5Fof%5Fthe%5FUnited%5FStatesAt a previous employer we deployed a number of the SuperMicro "Twin" server chassis. The Left server was always named after a Greek God. The right server was always named after His/Her Roman equivalent. So we had.
zeus / jupiter -- lachesis / decima -- artemis / diana -- mars / ares -- hermes / mercury --
Not the most original, but fun none the less.
We have used the characters from the Asterix books i.e. asterix, obelix, postaldistrix(for the mail server), getafix etc. Its quite a long list especially if you use other nationalities as well ie romans, belgian, goths etc.
My work had a catastrophic office fire where we lost all the desktops and roasted our in-office rack medium rare. (As a side note here: I Love offsite backups).
Previously we were using a 'southpark' naming scheme, but since most of our best loved servers were physically destroyed, we had the opportunity to start again with our naming scheme:
Our servers were named after salt-water creatures. Some:
The terminal server machines were all fresh-water fish, starting with:
At another job (and this was a while ago), the Sun-3 workstations were named after trees, and the Sun-4 workstations after islands. I was on Bermuda :)
I once campaigned for the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse for the domain controllers.
Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death
Didn't get past round one...
I have an internal domain (called 'theforest') setup and use species of trees as server names:
I use philosophers (and a few scientists). Well, the Master's degree in philosophy has to be useful for something. My laptop is called Ricoeur (after the French hermeneutic philosopher). Desktop machine is called Frege. Also: Gadamer, Darwin, Ayer, Davidson. I have a file on my laptop listing what any new machine gets called: Locke, Descartes, Heidegger, Russell, Sartre.
You can tell what operating system the machines are running by comparing their machine name to my attitude to the philosopher named. Linux/Unix/OS X machines are named after philosophers I like. Windows machines the opposite (Hegel - to quote Frederick Beiser's introduction to his book on Hegel: "Reading Hegel is often a trying and exhausting experience, the intellectual equivalent of chewing gravel" - a pretty good summary of my attitude to Windows). And routers, wifi access points etc. get named after ancient Greeks.
Where I am now, we use relatively boring naming conventions which ends up being a huge bastardization of the server OS, purpose, site assigned to, etc. That being said, back in the day and when I have the freedom and creativity to assign server names, I used to keep two volumes of "Guide to Mathematicians and Physicists" on my desk and use those for names.
(Good lord, I just re-read that and realized just exactly how nerdy/geeky it is. :) `s ok I suppose, I'm comfortable in my nerddom.)
...and wouldn't you know it that sometimes those servers would almost take on little quirky ways of behavior that almost in some ways matched that of their namesakes. :)
The again, was it us who was anthropomorphizing inanimate objects or guiding them in some way? :)
Also, since it makes sense to post it here. As a young uninitiated and recently out of the military starting helpdesk tech in California I remember being taken to our colo as part of the "wow" tour and seeing a successful web hosting company with a HUGE cage of mostly high-end sun servers that were labeled with weapon manufacturers as server names.
Ok, so I STILL think that's kinda neat. :)
I once renamed a server "basement" because it was always down.
I use metals for our VM bare "metal" host servers: gold1,2,3 iron1,2,3
Where the type of metal is the machine class or batch of machines that we purchased.
The VMs are named after their functional purpose, proxy1, web1 and fw1.
When someone in our answer asked us to be more creative with our server names, for instance name the servers after fish someone else in replied
you mean like
etc
I recently put together a test environment together, consisting of an application server and a backend SQL cluster.
Primary Node: Pea;
Secondary Node: Nut;
Shared Storage: Chocolate;
SQL Cluster: PeanutCluster;
Application Server: Wrapper
This naming convention didn't work out very well but me and the sysadmin were big reggae fans and it was my first job out of college, (and it was a startup). We used reggae artist names without spaces, seemed like a good idea at the time.
We had maytal, burningspear, congos, (my personal favorite) eek-a-mouse, heptones, wailers, pablomoses, augustuspablo, steelpulse and blackuhuru
Then one of the partners told us that blackuhuru "sounded offensive" so we renamed the servers by color, excluding the color black since we didn't want to be accused of being offensive. Anytime I play Black Uhuru I can't help but laugh.
Since I started to playing with routers and restrictions to users and their using of internet. We gave FreeBSD (router) the name Gestapo [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GestapoOne of our dns servers used to be named prude because "prude can't go down"
I'm not claiming it's the most awesome scheme, but it was fun for me. For quite a few years, I used the original names of streets in my neighborhood on the west side of Cleveland. It was a suburb long ago, and when Cleveland annexed the area they imposed a numbering system on the north-south streets and unduplicated the names of the east-west streets. Thus modern-day Mapledale Avenue, Archwood Avenue, and Denison Avenue translated into server names Maple, Greenwood, and Newburgh. West 25th and 33rd got servers named Columbus and Liberty. And so on.
The old-timers among my neighbors were amused, impressed, and/or baffled.
I use name of French porn actress :
Clara Morgane Melanie Coste ...
I once did a contract job in Amsterdam at a governing organization of establishments that rent rooms by the hour, the whole street was actually by the same owner. Amusingly I found that every machine was named after a STD.
The company I work for has chosen a company name with a strong connection to amino acids, and in consequence most of our core servers are named according to these acids:
Worked fine until we ran out of amino acids (there are only about 20 or so, and by now we have more than 150 servers), so sadly we had to go down the road of functional names with numbers and location indicators.
At home we use numbers. My dad was first to use that, with (how could it be an other number) fortytwo. He actually renames te old machine when he migrates to a new one, so the new one can be called fortytwo without conflicts. Currently I'm working on my laptop -twentyfive. You guess which processor is in it;)
Also at a small IT-business, machines were used to be called after Asterix& Obelix characters, but nowadays they're called different. My favourite is the gateway between te windows and the Linux network: Charon.
At my employer, we've named our databases and some of the machines in your development environment after The Big Lebowski characters and common themes.
For instance...
"TheRug", "TheBriefcase", "Donny" and "Walter"
I won't elaborate on what is exactly named after the infamous rug, but I will say that it LITERALLY ties the room together...or in this context, our production environment.
I personally use famous people (particularly mathematicians, engineers, scientists, philosophers, or artists) for all my devices, based on its function:
Laptop: Edison (Windows) & Tesla (Linux) ( Bitter rivals [1], I favor Tesla)
iPod: Mozart (Needs no explanation)
Printer: Gutenberg (Inventor of first printing press)
Phone: Faraday (Faraday's Law -> Maxwell's Equations: basis of all wireless communication)
External HD: Alexander (Library of Alexandria)
2 flash drives: Kerni and Ritchie (UNIX and "K&R C" C is my favorite language)
I love some of the suggestions here. Our school just uses trees (cypress, juniper, peach, etc.) for our old (Solaris 9!) Unix machines.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_CurrentsAt home I name my Linux servers after the planets in the solar system. At work (an ISP in Sydney, Australia) I work with servers named after either isolated cities in the Outback or dead prime ministers!
Named after Judas Prist song titles:
and a few more ;)
Where I work now, up until January every server and every workstation had a name (>300 machines here). When they died, they were replaced with new machines and new names. We found out that doesn't work well because people get attached when you do that ("Bender's my computer! No Edwin can't have him!"). Needless to say, we've had every naming theme out there.
My favourite bar none are our network switches. We've got a few Extreme Networks smart switches in some of the offices. Their names were Barney and Grimace after large purple celebrities. They've been upgraded now (old ones still kicking around though), and are named Ultra Barney and Ultra Grimace. I'm guessing our next giant purple switch will be named Ultra Dino. Any suggestions?
Some past themes:
For the office network, we name our servers after movie directors: KUBRICK, WOO, FELLINI, etc. But for the production and staging environments in the NOC, we take the functional approach: ENCODING01, UPLOAD04, etc. It works ...
I use Final Fantasy dieties/avatars/bosses/aeons/summons/notable characters/etc
Here's a google-set list of'm:
Now that "LOST" has released the names behind the numbers
192.168.0.4 = Locke (John)
192.168.0.8 = Rayes (Hugho)
192.168.0.15 = Ford (James)
192.168.0.16 = Jarrah (Sayid)
192.168.0.23 = Shephard (Jack)
192.168.0.42 = Kwon (Jin/Sun/Ji Yeon)
References [1]
[1] http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_NumbersI like to use citrus fruits of different colors, lime, orange, lemon, melon etc. and then blue for my personal box. Then I set the color of my prompt to match the name of the server. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Color_Bash_Prompt
One server was such a hassle to configure, that I named it PITA.
In Ye Olde Days of Networks Yore (circa 1980), Digital Equipment Corporation had their DECnet software that made it so you didn't have to know the network topology. You could just key in the name of the "server" and the DECnet software would figure it out.
I can't tell you how revolutionary this was.
DEC, being the 2nd largest computer maker, had a lot of facilities all over the world and they eventually tied them together with DECnet (which had the amazing capacity of 256 nodes for a while, then 1024!)
Major campuses and groups had their own schemes for naming their machines. Mind you, sometimes you had to be creative because of 6-character limits on the node names.
In England they had ARTHUR (I thought they would add Arthurian-legend-based names) then added TRILLI, SLARTI, ZAPHOD and MARVIN.
Over at The Mill in Maynard, they were a bit more traditionally geeky with KIRK, SPOCK, MCCOY and SCOTTY
Once the people in one group got sick of names like VAX4 and VX1522, we got the RSX group with their little machines that kept going up and down with OS test builds - NORI, DORI, ORI, GIMLI, GLOIN, etc.
Sometimes groups wanted to name their machines after the codenames of their new hardware.
The original VAX was the "STAR" project. So lot of VAXes got names after stars. The next iteration was called "COMET" so we had machines called HALLEY, KHOTEK, and AJAX (think about that last one). When the dual-processor ATLAS version came out, we had interesting pairs. RAND and MCNALY was one I remembered.
Then you had ones that had to do with the particular group. The Text Processing group had SCRIBE and QUILL.
Our group had one machine - we called it MERLIN (The Magic Vax!). Unfortunately we had to run DEC's "office suite" called DECmail on it. It was a HUGE memory hog that could bring a server to it's knees in nothing flat - everything was stored in a database written in an interpereted language called MUMPS. In order to store unique identifiers for everything, part of the identifier was the first three characters of the node name of the machine where it was running. We didn't want DECmail on our new system at all so we decided to name our 2nd machine "OZ".
Those were the days.
Small furry animals with sharp teeth and vicious tempers:
While this is only the VM name, not the server name, we named 3 of ours:
cluster-f$%^1
cluster-f$%^2
cluster-f$%^3
why you might ask...
because they are novell sles 10 servers....
I have "RTFM" and "WTF" hosts in my LAN :) "WTF" is a notebook, it's smaller ;)
For test servers - the first born children of staff of the IT department (these were the test babies). Benefits:
Trogdor
That is Trogdor the Burninator to you.
I use characters from children's TV programmes, mainly Thunderbirds [1]. Hence thunder, virgil, scott, brains, john, gordon and a pair of Digital Unix Alpha boxes parker and penelope.
The NIS domain is tracy_island :-)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbirds%5F%28TV%5Fseries%29When our first two node cluster arrived, we went with 'flip' and 'flop'. Each of the clusters arriving from that point on site were named after a duo of things of people. - So, how is bonnie & clyde doing? - I'm afraid that someone shut them down last night... :)
Back in the days of .com startups, a project I was working on we named all the servers after where we were going to retire to when we cashed out.
Some I remember were:
Hawaii
Tokyo
San Diego
Unfortunately, none of us are living in any of those places yet.
We start naming machines using Indiana jones characters/aliases (drjones, junior, lao-che, ...) but only a few were rememberable/labeleable.
After that, we migrated all of them to Dragon Ball Z characters and we found a large namespace. Currently:
I think that server's name should be funny and most of the staff users should be happy with them. Good TV series, Animes, Novels characters, planets are all good. Hope this helps somebody :D
In the early 90's we had a computer lab at Carnegie Mellon with 26 machines in it. Each one was named after a different psychological disorder -- mostly phobias -- and they were arranged in alphabetical order, each one starting with a different letter. I only remember a few offhand:
The two printers were named Calvin and Hobbes.
There was another, smaller lab, where the machines were named after natural disasters. One of them was named mankind.
At a smaller company we had the seven dwarves. Dopey really was dopey.
However, currently I'm working for a company with tens of thousands. At that point you need a decent naming scheme to make it easy and obvious to work out where a server is, what the server is, etc.
However, we have largely free reign over creating aliases to those servers which we map to the applications running on them. That way users, and us, get to browse to something memorable, and for DR purposes the aliases can be shifted automatically.
We use the last names of the richest people in the world: Gates, Buffett, Helu, Ellison, Kamprad etc.
http://www.forbes.com/business/billionaires/
I worked in a company where every machine has beer names :-) and servers had water names: (Vittel, Evian...) rofl
I've seen quite a few places using names from old Norse mythology (University of Copenhagen Comp. Sci. department and my old dorm uses it);
From what I've heard this is actually scheme used almost exclusively in Scandinavia!?
At my current dorm we use names of old residents, which includes a very handy (and rather large) subset of Nobel-laureates, prime ministers, and people famous for various other reasons.
Our CS Department used rappers and vegetables for example:
Rappers: - 2pac - dmx - dr-dre - eminem - ice-cube - ludicris - puff-daddy - snoop-dog
Vegetables: - artichoke - arugula - asparagus - beet - bean - broccoli - brussels-sprout - cabbage - ...
If you don't list how many names you may need there really aren't any constraints on your naming system.
Shaniqua! I choose you!
Discworld characters:
Main desktop - vetinari
Laptop - vimes
Shell account/web/mail server - lipwig
eeePC - rincewind (lots of travelling)
Once upon a time we had some Sun workstations called spot, light, shine...
Of course I encountered "spot" first and wondered if all the computers were named after pets.
I'm using city names from Terry Pratchett's "Discworld"-series:
My WLAN-SSID is "grandtrunk". ("Grand Trunk" is a company that provides wireless semaphore communication across the discworld).
There are only two servers in my office: galactica and pegasus.
I name my servers after Djs and then use their single names as the subs.
Hey how about GUIDs. And if you want meaningful names how about ripping features from VC++ 6.0 which used stuff like; 0xdeadbeef (Dead Beef) and so on...? ;)
I bet you could create a pretty cool name scheme with meaningful names using GUIDs text representation ...
That's a challenge... ;
Melbourne University had an interesting naming scheme for their machines.
Some sysadmin found an Australian Aborginial dictionary, and went through all the entries beginning with 'mu'. Some that I remember from undergrad days:
munta
mullauna
mundil
mulga
I always thought that was a great system. After a while I think they ran out of Aborigine words and starting using names from Greek mythology (not sure why).
EDIT: Oh, I found the names! [1]
[1] http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~ling/Work/machine-namesWhen I went to university (Simon Fraser), our undergrad Computing Science lab's Sun workstations were all named after stars and constellations:
and so on.
When the company that I work for first set up a network for their PCs (before they grew large enough to need an IT department), the servers were named after South Pacific islands:
Sadly, once the IT department took over, our servers have always been given boring names like file1, file2, ..., mail1, etc. {sigh!}
I like to use planet/star system names from Larry Niven's Known Universe series:
etc.
I've been naming mine after Zerg units from Starcraft (nerd alert!). So my towers were named Zergling, Hydralisk, and Ultralisk, respectively. My router is named Overlord, my old laptop was Mutalisk, and the new laptop is Guardian. Unfortunately, the Zerg don't have a bigger ground unit that the Ultralisk, so I don't know what I'm going to name my next one...
I contracted with a large listed UK company a few years ago. The guy who'd grown their on line business had named everything some variant of Juan - Big Juan, Little Juan, Third One, Male Juan (the mail server). etc. Amusing yes but they were up to about 45 servers and essentially had random badly spelt names for everything. Nightmare.
First, we used to use planet names:
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
But then we run out of names and we started to use internet slang:
lol
lulz
n00b
iykwim
lmao
rofl
ftw
bsod
imho
wtf
stfu
stfw
brb
1337
i worked at a client (government organisation no less) site some years ago and they had a whole bunch of windows nt servers. they named their boxen with words that ended with the letters nt. eg: variant grunt deviant repellent haunt etc...
how quaint....
I have only one server here, called "SERVER". It's easy to remember.
My printer is called "Printer".
It doesn't scale up, but it does scale down.
I once worked in an office where we had a new server installed on the same day one of the employees had his first baby boy. In order to commemorate the birth of child, we decided to let him "name" the new server.
...and what was the chosen server name, you ask?
"Uncut."
The company I worked for two years ago used a server naming scheme of "fucked dot.com company names". But after we had plenty of servers the scheme lost "dot.com" filter and became "fucked company names".
We even had a server named after "Enron"
I use Star Trek Ship names:
There are great lists on the net like this [1].
[1] http://startrek.wikia.com/wiki/Federation_starshipsI use Cowboy Bebop Character names.
And my (self made) kernel version are named after episodes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cowboy_Bebop_characters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cowboy_Bebop_episodes
And if there are not enough left, I'll switch to some other anime or series.
We use names from the transformers universe:
I once worked at a company where the engineers named their computers after local lakes. Our primary server was "Superior".
Trying to come up with unique computer names for a whole rack of servers, and still keep them human-pronouncable? Here's a clever system that maps the bytes of the IP addresses to three-letter words that you plug together like Legos.
I once used the 3 Stooges: Larry, Curry & Moe. (It was a small network)
How's this for the geek answer - Tolkien place names.
My personal favorites were from PSU:
One small engineering firm had servers and printers named after parts they used to build refineries:
I used to use Megatokyo characters, but I've been using them for ~5 years to name every bit of electronics with bluetooth or better (phones, pdas, laptops, desktops, iPods, etc.) and I pretty much ran out of characters.
One of the last to get named that way was my current home server, 'Ed'. I liked sshing to 'greg@ed', since I'm lazy.
So my current naming scheme is 'pronounceable 2 letter words', of which I currently have 'Ed' and 'Ax'.
Currently my suite of dev PCs are named after members of the Rat Pack. Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr at the moment. There used to be a Frank Sinatra, but he got re-installed.
Good for a smaller set.
I have these hosts on my home network:
I'm supplying my neighbours with internet and telephony access, their computers are all named after their owner's first names in my dhcp/dns.
Horde
Alliance
Undead
Tauren
Troll
Ogre
BloodElf
NightElf
Human
Dranai
Dwarf
Gnome
Uther
Arthas
Illidan
Vashj
Kael
Gruul
Prince
Archimonde
Thrall
Windrunner
Not sure it is that cool but I remember having named a machine "crash" because it was running Windows 2000 (small machine, only 120 8 MB of RAM). Murphy supposedly heard about this because it never crashed in two years...
Our servers are named after words in the dictionary starting with in:
Guess which one runs windows server...
At my first full-time office, the machines (ICL Perqs) were named after cows, in alphabetical order - and each had a customized cursor with the machine name and an image of a a cow on it:
Anaconda
I think naming them after old 80's ablums could be cool.
I saw sometime ago in our server room following server names: Kursk, Titanic, Challenger, Zeppelin. Must be happy project ongoing :D.
Where i work, ours servers are named after South Park characters...
On a side note, our printers are named after Simpsons characters...
:-)
1980s computers could be fun:
apricot dragon atom spectrum pet jupiter ace
river names :
you could play with it all - like all African rivers are in the same data center room, etc. improves your geography trivia knowledge as well :)
Worked at a company called Perseus Development. We of course named the servers after Greek Gods and heros:
At work we have to name the new servers whatever my boss dictates, so we have adserv, mailserv, backserv, blackberryserv, etc.
At home, I'm currently using names of things from the old Metroid game for NES
Out in the colo, I have 'metal band' names. For example:
Ridley dual boots, but in Windows mode it has to be named {$firstinitial}{$lastname}-{$department}, because my boss would think some crazy guy is accessing the network if a host like 'ridley' popped up in the DHCP logs, but in Unix mode it is Ridley.
Well, I'm crazy anyway >:)
One of my friends used ships that were in Wolf 359 [ http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Starships_at_Wolf_359 ] for a while, now he's using whatever tickles his fancy.
My home server is ninja, because it's the fastest machine I have and it's black. It's not very elusive though - you'd definitely hear it coming.
Our company is called "beweb" so we name all our computers after characters from the 60s "bewitched" tv show - Sam, Darrin, Tabitha, Larry, Sabrina, Clara.
Binghamton University has a Computer, Robotics, and Engineering special-interest housing module.
It is known as CoRE.
Core has a server in it's own subdomain off of binghamton.edu's address. And everytime they upgrade the server, they vote to rename it.
the only ones that come to mind are: reactor.core (.binghamton.edu) warp.core (.binghamton.edu)
nobody ever found a reason to make a mac into a server and create an apple.core to the best of my knowledge.
Some I've seen:
Starwars Droids
Sci Fi Movie Characters
Heavy Metals (my PC used to be Polonium)
British Isles Islands (more than you'd think)
Intangible nouns that end in -ity.
jack, marla and tyler.
I used to run an ISP and named all my servers after Star Wars characters. Luke, Leia, Yoda, etc etc. My fav was one of the mail servers called Amidala. Her SMTP greeting was "I am Amidala, spooler of the Universe."
I worked in a company, where the DHCP/DNS policy was to allow client systems to register their names within DNS.
This was very funny, when one day somebody obviously connected his notebook named "localhost".
Another good nameing scheme might be to use the first 8 characters of md5sum /var/log/messages.
Beer!
Seriously, we named all of the workstations after beers. And since it was a tech school, there were a great many computers. So we had jewels like smithwicks, smuttynose, courage, marriage-parfait, and girardin. They ended up calling my office machine asahi, since I was also in the school Anime club.
Also, the macs were named after vokdas (kettle-one, stoli) and the network printers were hard liquors, with the plotter being named absinthe.
I use colours (the only time I've had to name servers)
But I like the nato phonetic alphabet and mountains...
We use names from celtic mythology:
etc.
At a failed startup I ran, we started with our firewall being named asbestos. From that it followed that all servers were named after carcinogens, all workstations were poisons (belladonna, cyanide, etc.), and all printers were diseases (variola, varicella, influenza, etc.).
At Lycos, before more corporate minds prevailed, we had insects for laptops and mammals for workstations.
At CMU, our lab named all workstations after international cities (dakar, delhi, bangkok, berlin, stockholm).
At home I have named the stationary machines after goods and tribes from the game "Merchant of Venus" (so far: melfpelts, qossuth, nillis, humans) and characters from the movie "Tri orezky do popelku" (so far: rosalie, aschenputtel, vincek, zeremonienmeister).
I named my computers after monsters, cause it would be cool to have a monster-server. The big one is hulk, the little is shrek.
I actually usually don't try to follow a set "theme," but instead, prefer all my hostnames to have SOME kind of story behind them.
My favorites were from the last company I worked at:
No doubt about the funniest one though:
Angst Technology - Server room part 1 [1]
Angst Technology - Server room part 2 [2]
[1] http://www.inktank.com/archives/AT/index.cfm?nav=48been throught several:
Biohazardous materials: ebola, anthrax, marburg, h5n1...
Or ancient cities: babylon, alexandria, rhodes, crete... And for the one that you know that's going to crash, atlantis or pompeii.
At one of my old jobs I named the two DNS servers "slacker." and "geek." - The V.P. drew the line when I named the main proxy IP everyone who didn't have a static used as "peons." :)
My uni went with the 6 quark types:
top bottom charm strange up down
it's definitely gotta be punk band names, split them up if they're two words.
for a time, I had
now I've switched to mazda truck models:
I name machines after things that fly:
I manage a server that does the issue-tracking for the new development projects. I chose the name Charon to remind the programmers they're going in... deep. :-)
Zuul has been my main gateway/firewall at two completely different locations now.
A company I used to work for had 2 VMS boot nodes named WELLY and BOVVER. When we added a third Alpha box, the office wanted to call it KINKY but our boss at the time didn't have much of a sense of humour!
Have also used Monopoly place names (from the UK board) in the past :
Currently using the moons of Jupiter :
... and there are 63 in total, so a bit of room for expansion!
My favorites were from some computer clusters in college, long ago.
There was a room full of sun workstations, with names like "shine", "day", "dae", "block", "spot", "beam", ...
There was a room full of NeXT workstations, with names like "week", "ofkin", "tonothing", "toimpossible", ...
Always fun when you were out of the lab deciding on a random computer to log into to compile on, trying to think of a word that starts with sun, that not too many other people would have thought of too...
For a while, I used tennis stars: Serena, Vanessa, John, Bjorn, etc. Figured if they couldn't serve, then who could?
Sadly, no single IT person has lasted here more than a couple of years so the naming scheme has become... well, inconsistent. The most common one though is naming it after it's model. Like x206 for our IBM X206 or pe2950i for our Dell PowerEdge that stores Images. Since we're a smallish businesses, our servers have been bought one or two at a time so it works. I like this because, like with irrelevant names, we can repurpose the box without getting it's roles confused.
Use city names:
I find it kind of exciting to log into these cities. Plus, you'll never run out of names ...
The BYU CS Department student labs machines are all named in clever ways, with some utility.
Each lab has a theme, with each computer named along the theme.
Lab names: Fruits, Simpsons, Weapons, Instruments, Sports, Monsters, and Pizza.
This allows easy identification of the room where each machine resides: Zombie (Monsters) Homer (Simpsons) Cherry (Fruits) Longbow (Weapons)
Each lab has a machine type as well, allowing easy access to a Mac Mini (fruits), or machines of various power.
Documentation here [1] (a little old, at this point):
[1] http://docs.cs.byu.edu/general/remoteaccess.html#list-of-all-accessible-computersWe used to use disasters (actual, movie, companies, products, ideas, politics etc):
titanic
andreadoria
apartheid
confederacy
waterworld
ngage
codered
diebold
cuecat
etc...
Now we use dead people (actors/actresses, rock stars etc):
joplin
morrison
cobain
carlin
moon
abbott (Dime Bag)
etc...
When I co-founded Sapient Health Network (later to be rolled into WebMD), I got to choose how to name the servers.
After seeing a deck of playing cards of "Famous Physicians" at the technical book store during my lunch break, I knew I had my answer! Doctors!
Back at the office I unpacked the first server and named it hippocrates, of course.
Later came salk (Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine), flemming, etc.
But the "others" were just as fun.
julius was so named after discovering that one letter hostnames are not to RFC spec. (get that?)
zhivago.
teeth (keyboardist for Muppet band Electric Mayhem).
death (when our head sysadmin setup a temporary test box while in a VERY foul mood).
love.
When I worked at a visual effects company in Culver City all of the servers were named after alcoholic drinks or mixers; we had TONIC, OLGRANDAD, SEVENUP, SAMBUCA, etc.
There were hundreds of servers and they all dutifully followed the naming scheme. There were some that I thought didn't follow the scheme--until I saw the alcohol it was named after in a bar!
This was also a place where the artists kept bottles of whiskey above their desks for emergencies (i.e. late-Friday requests from the client to make the background "50% more gray.").
At my last job we named our machines after 80's rock bands (both the metal and hair varieties). When we couldn't think of any more, we started doing 80's pro-wrestlers.
A couple of jobs ago, we intially used characters from Futurama:
We then later on got a load more and named them all after XMen. The manager was set on only having the "good" xmen, and wouldn't even entertain ones that used to be bad, but are now good.
Well my work is called Gamerz Arena and our little short name is GzA so most of the time it is just gzafileserv or gzafs but an old employee brought in this giant server that had a big box case that somewhat resembled a Borg Cube so we called it GzA-Borg. Nothing really cool or exciting but if we put up any new servers I will be sure to think up something neat sounding.
We had a server that was mainly there to run a product called Support Wizard. We called it Harry (as in Potter).
We had another machine that had services that would crash quite often, so we called it Kenny. Thus, every time someone complained they couldn't get their generation report we would yell, "Oh my God! They've killed Kenny!"
Sometimes you have to take pleasure in the little things...
Yahoo uses an internal system that generates host names comprised of 2 words. I've had such interesting hosts at random as captaincook, wifeschool (er...) and raindance.
It's fun to find out what random combination you end up with.
We have servers named after planets, constellations, birds and animals we've never heard of like tucana,serpens and canis and some known birds like phoenix, flamingo etc. This got me hooked on to finding exotic server names for sure!
I name them after the books of the Bible, maybe not the coolest but the first is always Genesis. You can find some interesting plays around the names and versus for IP addresses.
Long time ago I used to name them after computers in comic books. Can't remember any except Cerebro (i think) from X-Men.
Nobel-prize-winning physicists.
When we run out of those, we'll switch to other disciplines.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/
At work, I stumbled upon a Linux test server with IP 10.0.0.69 and its hostname was "pr0n". Veeery mature.
I even kept a screenshot:
Not "cool" per se, but "gutsy" in the corporate environment we had.
Bond Villians: DrNo Blofeld Goldfinger Jaws MrBig
We had a new managing director turn up one day in a brand new Lotus Exige [1] which promptly got stolen the next day. His new workstation was of course then called EXIGE.
I'm not sure he ever actually noticed - and the company went bust 6 months later...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExigeFrom my old job at the Springfield Mass school system back in the 90s: We had two PDP-11/44's called YPIG17 and YSOW17 ( Yellow Pig 17 [1] and Yellow Sow 17)
[1] http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Yellow:Pig:s:Day.htmI choose scientists - currently our main server is Turing followed by Einstein, Newton, and Feynman
When I switched to Linux, I named my first system Prometheus since it was the "Bringer of Fire". Since then, I've gone on to name the others after his siblings, Epimetheus Atlas Menoetius
and will continue with the rest of the Titans.
Monster
Names of gods
They will punish you if you forget to offer young virgin girls...or backup tapes
link text [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_GodOrganizations whose server names have wide exposure would do well to select them from lists that have been vetted to remove anything offensive or revealing.
Lists of cities, colors, birds, tropical islands ...
I worked for a defense contractor that followed this policy ... it was neat to login on a cold winter night to Maui or Tahiti.
Regards, Bill Drissel
Because I'm a biologist, I named my Linux boxes after (parts of the scientific name of) birds.
I simply took a
Dutch guide about birds in Western Europe
[1] and took the bird that came first alphabetically, the "aalscholver" (
Great Cormorant
[2], or Phalacrocorax carbo). Hence, my first machine was named phalacrocorax.
My current machine is named after the bird that comes second in alphabetical order, the "aasgier" (
Egyptian vulture
[3] or Neophron percnopterus). This time, I liked the
specific name
[4] better then the genus name, so my current machine is called percnopterus.
Varieties of hops: galena, saaz, fuggles, bullion etc.
We had Romeo and Juliet (2 different servers) in one company...
Negative feelings/sentiments:
We had a collection of servers called after cinema actors, which allowes for nice grouping, beeing one example Connery/Lazenby/Moore/Dalton/Brosnan/Craig one group.
The back in the days not so usual double-processor-engines were named after Anderson, Kinski, Electra and so on.
We also had one group of servers where only one machine was dual-processor, which was called Dublin, as the city with two Hearts, then the remaining machines in that group got other capital names.
You'd find approriate thing in each and every grouping: When the firewall was upgraded to a failoversystem, it was renamed from Kerberos to Smith and Wesson, protecting the mailserver Hermes.
I Worked for a UK local goverment software house where we used curries as server names:
vindaloo, balti, korma, Biryani - you get the picture..
Back in the day, we named all of our servers after simpsons characters. However, as the business grew, we were victims of our own success - while there are many many simpsons characters, once you've got hundreds and hundreds of servers, it becomes challenging. So after having to say things like, "Moe17 is down" "Again?! Why can't moe17 be more like moe65", we decided that anything in a cluster or load-balanced pool would get a functional name, and only one-offs, like database servers, would be blessed with Simpsons names.
and for those people who name their servers based on their IP address...trust me, there will come a point at which you have to renumber your servers...and then you will see the pain you have just inflected on yourself. Trust me.
We went through our period of booze related names. Our app servers spent about 5 years named:
JCurevo
WTurkey
JDaniels
Unfortunately the names have stuck with the old timers so the newbies wonder what we are talking about when we refer to machines as Turkey or Cuervo.
I had a boss that was interested in astronomy, so he named his workstations after planets and his servers after star formations and networks after galaxies. Only time he broke that was with naming a remote site that was far away from his house during Winter...called that Siberia.
Beaches. It is always nice to have some application running at south beach, venice, oahu, borabora...
The coolest name would be "absolute-zero".
(Sorry.)
Half-Life 2 Universe...
I just built a system to be a CCTV NVR (camera recorder) as well as it being the interface system for our building access control. I named it O'Brien as a nod to the character that turns in Winston in 1984.
Holy hell were people bitching and moaning when I was putting the camera system in. It's something our clients wanted. It is positioned not to focus on people at their desks, and it's not like anybody watches the thing. It's there as a deterrent since we deal with multiple competing clients and sensitive equipment. If something happens, then we can review the recording, that's it, argh.
We use the simson:
I try and use different themes for different clients. At a recent one, we decided to go for characters from The Wire. So the PDC is called Marlo, the firewall is Propjoe (the connect), and other servers are Bubbles, Bunk and Omar.
For my home network Ive gone for an Anathem theme. The server is Arbre, desktop machine is Terra and laptop is called Monyafeek.
At my primary employer we use the names of dogs in the office since we're a dog-themed computer retailer and always have numerous dogs running around the offices, stores, and warehouse.
For my personal side projects I always use romanji names:
Plenty of possibilities there.
I use Akira Kurosawa films.
yojimbo, rashomon, ikiru etc...
We talked about setting up some machines at school and naming them after stock markets:
DOW and NYSE are down, but at least NASDAQ is up!
I use deities- Norse for servers (odin, thor, loki, freya, baldr) and Egyptian for disks (bast, anubis, ra, menthu, maat, khonshu, osiris)
Failing that, I use a synonym or word otherwise related to the machine's model name- Forex, my MSI Wind is named Khansim.
If I had to start from scratch, I'd use just deities, starting with Babylonian and Assyrian, moving to Egyptian, then to Norse. If I STILL ran out I suppose I'd move on to the still more obscure.
I used to work for one company we named all of our servers after drums. It was fun
Wow this is a long list. I wasn't able to go through the whole thing. The only funny name that I can add is the name for our offsite backup server for our main file server. Which is Plan-C. The onsite backup server ironically is not called Plan-B.
Biblical Names are good:
Guess if you were going in order you would have to start with God.
I prefer starting with the founding fathers
Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin ...etc
Then using the list of presidents around JQA.
but I'm boring.
I name mine after vocabulary from Toki Pona [1] contructed language. The words are usually short (a total of 118 words):
Each server rack used dirrent movie name characters.
Server rack #1 was StarWars characters, #2 was Austin Powers, ect... We only used widly know mainstream movies and ALWAYS picked the crziest names from each.
I name my computers after the CPU codename. Not very creative, but it relieves the burden of having to be decisive. Only works if your purchase pattern is staggered though. I only buy one at a time, and don't buy the next machine until the next CPU is released.
I once worked for an adult web company that had a reasonable cage at a leased colo. The first time I walked in I almost peed myself. The servers were all named after porn stars. Jenna ran our mail. Teanna was our firewall and Kimmy was my dev box. We had 10+ more that had similar names. It certainly gave you a start to hear "Roxy just died so we need to get Jenna to stand in for her..."
Mine are Titans and deities from Greek mythology.
So far. Plenty more to choose from.
bike frame and accessories brands
gt gts schwinn jamis merida marin ibis titus turner garyfisher louisgarneau ellseworth fox rochshox dakine avid sram truvativ shimano specialized dabomb chrisking canecreek fsa easton thompson maxis kenda continental mavic syncros michelin camelback thenorthface topeak salsa hope velo fi'zi:k selleitalia
These are ours where I work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brightest_stars
Been using that for real machines and the greek letters for virtual machines.
My friend has a office with very few clients and a server. The server is named "English" and the clients...
Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta .......
I name mine after Green Lantern items/places/names.
etc.
We used names of musical instruments: Piano Saxophone Trombone Trumpet ...
MST3K characters.
My choices for Joel and Mike are directly analogous to each of their fans' hatred for the other's fans, and also to which one is truly superior.
I'm a big fan of George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and as such I name my stuff along that theme (with a particular bias towards House Targaryen, the local domain being targaryen.local)
My routers are named after places (dragonstone, valyria, winterfell, dorne) My switches are named after Houses (Stark, Tyrell, Martell, Dayne) My hosts are named after people (Tyrion, Daenerys, Rhaegar, Arya, Sansa)
With my name servers having special hostnames of, of course, Fire and Blood
It gives me enough naming possibiltiies while still retaining some semblance of a hiearchy
i use locations from the elder scrolls series for my personal workstations. furthermore, i never use the same type of location twice (ie two cities).
my next one might be rumare -- the name of a large lake in cyrodiil.
I use subatomic particles:
I'm starting to run out of ideas, though. I suppose that the logical progression is proton/neutron/electron, and then the names of atoms.
I name my servers after poisons.
Currently, I have:
for only one server - skynet!
I worked with one client who's servers were named Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato.
At home, I started using minor/ancillary characters or pets from web comics. ChooChoobear, Pepito, ScratchFury - just named the new printer Hobbes (which threw the "minor/ancillary" scheme).
At work, we have [TLA of company]dbXX. Which, of course, means that each server could be an App or DB server (or both), could be Windows or Linux, could be in use (or not), could be internal or colo. And we do have a case where the same name is used for an internal box as well as external box.
I work for a company that does GPS tracking of vehicles, and our current production gateway is running several servers, all Sesame Street Muppets. Not Muppet Show muppets, the exception was Kermit who was easliy able to go between those shows.
But since we started our rebuild, we decided to go with Futurama characters:
All of my developers laugh when I demand a name for a new component to the system, but they never disappoint.
pedro, rico, deb, lafawnduh, kip, etc.
For my personal boxes, I don't have a naming convention. At least, not a conventional one. Instead, I use names from whatever topics are interesting to me at that point in my life.
Favorites so far:
The only exception is my PS3, dubbed "overpricedmonster"
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_MythosVideo Games!!!
We use video game names. It's a good scheme because there's a huge list of them, so even getting to hundreds of boxes isn't a problem. www.klov.com provides a new one whenever you need!
Internal to our company, there are also groups using Indian tribe names (ERP systems) and astronomical names (databases). But video games are better!
We used Optimus and Megatron on a couple servers we used for testing and development.. All production servers have the nice boring functional names
At home, I use the model name of the system 1720, xps430 etc...
But the drives are all shared and use Halo references
Cortana (C: on My main) The Library (Storage on main) Deep Winter (storage on main laptop) 343 guilty spark (main drive on Netbook
Cluenet [1] use mathematical terms: http://wiki.cluenet.org/ClueNet:Comparison_of_Servers
[1] http://cluenet.orgAt home, I use derivations of localhost: loocahost, lolcathost, localhst, etc. Confusing, but it works.
The box I'm typing this on used to be called localhost exactly, but that screwed up Windows file sharing.
I used to be involved in a non-profit organization a bunch of years ago where the not-so-uncommon list of characters greek mythology was used, after the respective character's most common trait.
The use of various mythologies entities is great IMO, a good number of choices and the most prominent traits as used in above example makes it both unique, logical and IMO easy to remember. (Watch out for crossing various mythologies, however...)
We are using characters of Asterix comics like Asterix, Obelix, Idefix, Miraculix, Majestix... :-)
Mine are named after bond girls:
Xenia Octopussy Wailin Elektra
etc etc
Nice easy theme that I don't think many people have.
I like naming conventions that are nested so that it is easier to distinguish physical servers from virtual servers running as guests.
Wine Example:
Physical servers would be named after wine regions:
While their virtualized guest machines would be named after types of grapes. If possible, pick a grape that has a similar spelling to the purpose of each machine.
There are many nested naming conventions to consider:
We would have a few nested naming conventions to distinguish production machines from development or testing machines. For example, while our production machines were named after wine-region/wine or development machines were named after country/cheese.
we used to name ours after star wars planets, which was fun until everyone stopped remembering what exactly was on hoth or tattooine. after around 30 servers it became an issue so we had to move to something more conventional/descriptive
Working at a university physics department, we had machines named after physicists (required to be dead physicists, IIRC). Einstein, Newton, etc. That was cool, until someone wanted their workstation called Zamolodchikov (and I can still type that name without thinking about it...)
I think the new best server name is "Avatar" . LOL
planets of solar system: 192.168.0.5 - phobos 192.168.0.6 - saturn 192.168.0.8 - mercury
We have two server with names Bill and Hillary, now the question is who is on top of who ;-)
I once reconfigured an entire SBS network using world cities as names. New York, Delhi, San Francisco, Sydney, Beijing, ..
The Domain server was Baghdad. This was in 2003.
My school goes off of Egyptian gods - sekhmet (just got rid of that one - old web server), jupiter, athena, atlas, etc.
Loving the naming techniques - I'm a new (teen) geek, and I love the old ways of server setup (I remember playing with old DOS and internet setups as a kid!)
Great post :)
-SiNT4X
For the past few years I have been using the names of cities/suburbs in the State of Hawaii. Initially the idea was to have different architectures be confined to specific islands (E.g.: Oahu was for x86) but that didn't last. (I grew up there a bit, and finished University there too. Now I'm freezing my buns of in the Swiss Alps. Go figure.)
That's it so far.
I'm sure I've posted this one one of these sites...
At a place I used to work, the Unix sysadmin started naming the Unix machines after people who'd left. He got away with it for a long time, too, until Unix started getting a profile -- we were a mainframe and mini-computer shop, for the most part. IIRC, the first to really break from tradition was calling the datawarehouse box 'jumbo' (I wanted to call it 'tarasque'). After I left, they got another one and called it 'fivedock' (there's a suburb in Sydney called Five Dock which used to be full of warehouses :-)
The company that bought us around this time had been using Unix boxes for things more than us. They were using Greek mythology for a while (how original). Then one new server got called 'hercules'. Remember: this was in the mid '90s. The next server in the same department got called 'xena'. The sysadmins were not amused. I believe there was a third that got called 'gabrielle' before too long.
Worked at a place where my coworker and I decided to name our systems after moons of the solar system. I chose Phobos and Deimos for my development systems, our main server was Titan. We had a system we used when we needed to perform data captures at clients' offices that we named "Io" (i/o) since we took it in and out of the office so often.
Back when I worked for a college, I named servers after Transformers. Autobot names for Novell servers, Decepticon names for Windows servers, and Junkion names for *nix.
I used programming languages, but that's boring. Now using scientists' names. Newton, Curie, etc
When I worked at a non-profit organization that worked on international development issues, we chose our server names from UNESCO's World Heritage List [1]. We filtered the list by accepting only names that were 6-12 characters and somewhat easy to spell (by English speaking Americans). This eliminated harder to type names such as Te Wahipounamu, Koutammakou or Skogskyrkogården
Our list included:
I personally use mythology and whatever sounds cool to me, at that time.
my "live" server for instance is called Ragnarok, my laptop is Thanatos, my desktop is Erebus.
Computers / workstations tend to be Greek mythology, servers Nors mythology.
Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion [1].
Also, at one point we used names of Ultima Online [2] towns:
etc
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Angels_in_Neon_Genesis_EvangelionAll mine are named after the Magic Roundabout
Dylan, Brian, Dougal, Zebedee, Ermintrude, Rosalie, Mr Rusty, Parsley
And the main wireless accesspoint is called The Magic Roundabout
At work we named a group of our servers after anything with 'ice' in it.
We have amongst others:
Personally I have named my servers/workstations/laptops after famous chiefs of states. Until now:
Scooby Do characters...
At home I go by the greek alphabet in order of system attainment.
So for instance, my first computer(which still runs) is EarlzAlpha, my second(decommissioned) EarlzBeta and so on until Delta. I also have what I call a "cluster" which goes by boring names based on their IP address, so Cluster1, Cluster2.. And the OS on my thumbdrive has a hostname of EarlzPortable
The soho network here is called nostromo, the servers are named after characters from the Alien movies: ripley, bishop, vazquez, etc. I'm typing this on call, my iPhone is called newt (the little one from the second part). Unfortunately, all the characters die at some stage, that's why the backups go to mother aka the cloud.
The ultimate name in my opinion is "Mozku" which is Ukrainian for brain
At my old work in Colorado, I named the systems after the Colorado 14ers [1]:
I reserved the tallest Colorado 14ers for the servers.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Colorado_fourteenersNot quite servers, I do name all of my devices that can be named, for instance, my G1 phone, with its protruding "chin", was named "Leno", but that broke so the iPhone 3GS I replaced it with became "Conan".
My desktop computer is named "Zero-One", after, well, binary.
My HP Pavilion dv2000 laptop, which has a wind pattern on its cover, is named "Zephyr".
My brother names his devices as if they were people, not making reference to anything: his laptop is named "Howard" and his Nintendo Wii is "Howie Jr."
And when I was in an after school video program in high school, we used to have a bunch of external hard drives that we'd store our footage on, and we'd come up with and vote on names for them all. My personal favorite? "Chocolate-Covered Peanut Butter-Filled Pretzels", after the always on-hand Trader Joe's snack, which of course then became abbreviated, however impractically, to "CCPBFP".
We name our serves by hostclass, which means each host in that category solves the same purpose or has the same pkgs. Dbo, ldap, dns, mail, smtp nags(nagios) etc.( restrict to 4 characters)
So hostnames are like: devldap100, devdns112, devsmtp899, stgnags120, prdmail292
template: <3 letter env eg. dev, stg,prd><4 letter hostclass><3 0r 4 digits>
Also note hosts with numbers less than 100 are testing i.e not ready for mass usage. Example: devldap003 is a test box.
If you have more than one project/product use domain differentiation like
devexch192.iphone.domain.com
prdapc123.ipod.domain.com
I like pronouns, they are short and lend strange meanings to your machines.
it
him
her
us
them
you
me
yall
For a grinder network the machines (a mix of PC, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris boxes) that ran the test agents were named after the actors that had played James Bond. The test controller was named LEE after the actor who played M and the test server that handed out test resources was named LLEWELYN after Q.
Guess which windows drives we mapped the public shares of the test controller and test server to?
Anybody thought of body organs?
you could even add more than one for some of them ("left eye, "right lung", etc.)
We use classes of federation starships from Star trek, with the exception of Enterprise, my workstation ;)
Enterprise
Soverign - DC
Intrepid - F/P
Defiant - IPS
Excelsior - DC
Ambassador - Mail
Oberth - A/V
Cheyenne
Galaxy - DC
etc..
What about stars names : Rigel, Capella, Aldebaran, Vega ...
My media box is called Dionysus - the Greek patron god of the theatre.
My network attached storage box is called Consus - the Roman god of subterranean storage and silos.
Oh, and my old, slow laptop is called Godot [1]
;-)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting%5Ffor%5FGodotA friend of mine told me a story about where he used to work, and the names they chose were the Horses of the Apocolypse - including:
...and so forth.
Where I work, there's as many themes as there are names - at least it seems like it... There are these themes, for example:
Another place I worked, all of the test servers were named after tests: quiz, test, exam, etc...
In my home setup, I normally have used girl's names - but have switched recently to two different themes:
When the Internet was young, the University of Wisconsin Primate Center was in the forefront - especially when it came to USENET. They used, appropriately enough, breeds of monkeys. rhesus is the only one I remember; it was a major node on the USENET backbone as I recall.
GAMES
Right now I'm using "starcraft2", because "starcraft" was already in use when I joined.
At my previous company, I had warcraft and ssb (super-smash-bros).
Lately, my humor has turned a bit darker, I would probably use "bad words from my favorite Sci Fi shows". "frack" is too obvious, but "frell" and "zog" seem to come to my mind a lot these days...
At one company, we had both serialized names (qa + hardware type + model + number).
But we also encouraged vanity names (you just had to remember when was appropriate to use one or the other).
The thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that we also named subnets after elements of the periodic table. It kind of started when a bunch of ex-Cobalt employees got hired. :)
At the school I work at we have the name of the town we're in prepending the mail server platform, which is Exchange. Unfortunately the name of the town ends in an 'S', so when you say the name of the server it ended up sounding like "sexchange". One of the users noticed it before we did.
I had to name over 200 servers for the Navy once. We used fish! (original, I know). My Intergraph workstation was "soapfish". We also had a requirement that they had to be less than eight characters. We did not use Thresher, obviously.
I've named my home server goliath and my desktops have ranged from unoriginal (Dell-Ubuntu) to the factual (tester) to extremely succinct (dev) to everything in between.
At the company I work at, they use islands. You will never ever run out of islands. You can also group clusters with island groups. Our firewalls are called Barbuda and Antigua. The server which produces munin graphs is called Algron, after the island Odin stayed for five years. :)
When I still lived at my parents, my dad started to call his server 'dog' and every workstation after that had a doggy name. Like the firewall was called guarddog, the computer with our first cd-burner was called hotdog and my computer was bulldog. So when I moved out, I took bulldog with me and started with dog breeds.
Somewhere in college I got two 19" 7u servers, they were big and heavy so I called them Akita and Mastino. My first laptop was called Chihuahua, my second laptop I named Draver. My manageable switches are called Bordercollie (that's the one with the internet uplink) and Beardedcollie. My Sun Sparcstaion is called Dalmation, because Sparky the firemans dog is a dalmatian. :) I also have a nice quiet Sun Javastation, which I called Basenji, a dog breed that doesn't bark.
There was only one server that didn't have a real dog breed name, my first firewall that ran OpenBSD. The logo of OpenBSD is ofcourse a blowfish. In Dutch a seal is called a seadog (zeehond). So I thought it would be appropriate to call it seal.
I also hosted a server for the local university pub, so the first dog breed that I could come up with was Stbernard. The computers at the office of that pub are all called after beer, most of them Belgian beer. So we've got Koninck, Leffe, StilleNacht, Westvleteren, ...
When I installed a network at a youth camp, all computers were named after smurfs. The server was called PapaSmurf.
Cerebrum & Cerebellum
We used major cities for internal servers. We could group related servers into continents or countries too. For example, our development server was called Athens (windows) and Sparta (linux).
We did planets.
Imagine the fun with uranus.
Whos on uranus?
Is uranus backed up? My fav.
Who much RAM is in uranus?
Can I get on uranus?
What Hard drive is in uranus?
Uranus is down!! Argh!
Can you put some Ram in uranus??
At my one of my previous jobs I used Norse Mythology for my the Test Domain I ran for Test.
For some reason, a web server I named Loki always gave me problems...
I'm currently using TV Detectives; Kojak, Columbo, Rockford....we even have Telly Savalas' album on display. :-)
When I joined my first company, it had a whole bunch of servers named after beers. It lasted a couple of years before corporate found out and got them replaced by bland droid names.
As I'm a geek at home I have my domain called UFP and servers are Planets and machines are ship names. Most fans will get what I'm talking about.
Then with my office stuff, servers are greek gods/legends like Achilles, Zeus, Hades, etc.
I call all my private computers, servers, devices after Futurama characters:
Laptop - Zoidberg
Desktop - Bender
WLAN-Router - Farnsworth
Mobile - Nibbler (Bluetooth)
server - Fry
Futurama <3
At work, the servers are named like planets (uranus, etc.).
From another project, the servers have random names like thunderstorm, deathrow, etc.
Our clients servers are all named extremely boring and i notice that it's really harder to memorize what server you want to connect with when its called like mx01, mx02, etc.
It seems that clear names like mx01, mail01, web01 should be more memorizable and easier but from my experience speaking names are much better. I can still remember what was running on which server from years ago, whereas i still need to check up on the boring numbered names often enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_names_of_drugs
Take your pick, either the list of drugs, or the synonyms for your favorite ones.
In a place I worked in there was a couple of old, old servers (dual 486!) about a CUBIC METER each in size, which once formed a cluster. Their names were "Pietro" and "Paolo" (from st. Peter and st. Paul).
In another place, there was a lonely domain controller which someone had named "rettavia" ("retta via" is Italian for "straight path"); I had to build another one, so I named it "cattivastrada" ("cattiva strada" means "wrong road").
We've used Starbucks coffees to name our servers before:
verona
estima
espresso
lightnote (our Exchange server - haha)
sidamo
serena
I use Farscape names.
Crichton Aeryn Sun Dargo Pilot Rygel Chiana Scorpius
If i ever need more I will use Serenity names.
Nautical
A bit of topic but I name my disks (internal and external) after the marx brothers [1]. Unfortunately there are only five...
[1] http://www.marx-brothers.org/I would definitely use names of characters from the movie Toy Story [1]. I bet no one has ever had this thought before me! Uhm... yeah (Hint: Debian).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy%5FstoryWhile most of you probably wouldn't get this one, I use the name of maps from Unreal2:XMP
Rampant is the file server, Nakoja is my computer. Garden is the music server, Alcazar is the laptop, etc.
When first learning about AD and domains and forests, I named the forest Sherwood. All the servers were locations from Robin Hood and the user logins were characters.
At my current job, we started with gemstones, until we ran out of pronounceable and spellable names. We've now switched to using mythological creatures, people, and places...not too much easier to spell, but more entertaining for sure!
Other places I've worked we did Transformers themes, Star Wars (I know, how original), Thundercats, Wizard of Oz, and Star Trek TOS.
A bit late to this thread, but I worked for a company in NY where the CEO really liked buying used 8U multi CPU monsters for the "computer room" (server room as it would later become) because they looked "cool" and "powerful". I named 'em after appliances. whirlpool frigidaire acme maytag kenmore (and so on) He wasn't amused, but since I was his goto guy for everything engineering or IT, he wasn't exactly in a position to object. Me? I was in geek heaven. :)
Maybe not so original, but I'll let you judge by yourselves.
We use town names. But not any town name. Only belgian town name where a beer of the same name is brewed. That leads to something like:
achel, affligem, chimay, ciney, floreffe, grimbergen, hoegaarden, leffe, maredsous, orval, rochefort, tongerlo, villers, westmalle
I haven't actually experienced this one for myself, but apparently at some college dorm, a couple people had set up "myhostnameislongerthanyours" and "scabcoveredpusfilledsores".
Those ones take the cake, if you ask me.
I once named a cobbled-together Linux machine frankenstein (ignoring the fact that it's the name of the doctor, not the monster), so subsequently I named machines after other fictional monsters: godzilla, etc.
Another scheme I've used is varieties of tetras [1] (fish), so I had emperor (primary server), neon, glowlight, lemon (I was afraid that one might be a jinx, but no).
I name my cellphones bluegill.
My next laptop will be named dionysus after the Greek origin of my name (I'll have to use bacchus, too, for something).
eBay once named their servers after lizards.
Another good scheme is comedians: abbott, costello, groucho, harpo, chico, gummo, zeppo, moe, larry, curly, shemp, laurel, hardy, burns, allen, rowan, martin, cheech, chong and many more.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TetraI have to admit I am enjoying reading the server names ;)
I'm using Animaniacs characters. I currently have: * Yakko * Wakko * Dot * Pinky * Brain * OttoScratchNSniff * And a backup hard-drive named: Schnitzelpusskrankengescheitmeyer.
SIMPSONS! I used the characters from the Simpsons-- there are like 60 in all. We had Bart, Lisa, Homer, and Marge in place I left. I also had a couple of identical virtual servers that I named Thelma and Selma (Marge's twin sisters). I wanted to name the main database server after the character "Database" but that seemed weird-- it became Homer instead b/c it was the fattest server.
At my last workplace we had the name of Marvel comic characters. e.g. stark, blaze, parker etc
Another workplace they had cleaners e.g. jiff, ajax etc
Since, I'm a huge Robotech fan, I use the following for one class of servers:
alphafighter betafighter shadowfighter battlecruiser destroid battlepod hovertank cylone sdf1/2/3 megazone bioroids veritech Invid shocktrooper
and these for other class of servers:
fokker (we have lot of fun with this one) rick lisa max (my box) miriya lunk scott rand rook anni (this is floater - very annoying) zentraedi . . . .
I have a machine that runs as a firewall only....i call it Nightmare.
We have about 12 other servers in one building with standard names that relate to the purpose of the server. These were named by the previous sysadmin. I plan on changing them as I replace the machines...and have found some great ideas here.
I once had an old HP server that was really noisy, it was deployed in one of our office rooms and most users were really pissed, when the box was up'n'running.
Because of its noise, it was named after the old nordic god of thunder: "Thor"
These days we have servers named after cats of prey like - tiger, based on its Tyan "Tiger" mainboard.. - jaguar - leopard
This was before we bought our first apple computer and realized that their OS releases were named like our servers.
User BOXERS. Ali, Frazier, Tyson....
Makes it easier to 'punch' thru the firewall.
ok, I read them all and why I saw a couple mentioning AI's, and obviously a few were from William Gibson novels, but so far my home network started out consisting of all AI's from Gibson's novels (armitage, wintermute, chrome, neuromancer)... I added my windows mobile phone and couldnt think of another, so I justed used Case for my phone. I'll add Dixieflatline and perhaps Molly and Maelcum later.
Hot Chicks from Buffy, then DS9 Esrie, Dax and Kira when I ran out of Buffy totty.
We used dead rock-stars at one place I worked:
... etc
At one job used to name servers and workstations after Monsters.
I used to use old 3&486's for teaching myself linux and networking during college. The naming scheme I used was: character names, no more than one name per source.
The first one was Jefry (with one F). Then Deckard (at the time, my brand-new P-II workstation). Then Bilbo, Gonzo (the muppet), Hunter (the journalist), Raoul (the cartoon character), Angharad, Rathbone, and Wintermute (seems a popular name around here). The last one in that scheme was Snowden, added in '01 or so.
Snowden's the only survivor of that bunch (and on basically the same hardware!). Since then I've seen the movie with Alan Arkin, and Snowden's been joined by Yossarian, McWatt, Orr, Nately, Major, Daneeka and Dreedle.
I only regret Yossarian. It's a pain to type.
FUDS
It was a perfectly legit acronym that described the role of the server, but anybody who's familiar with Scottish vernacular knows what a FUD is...
My proudest moment.
old dead actors or Star Control II solar systems
In my old lab we named our machines after sharks.
mako, nurse, tiger, lemon, goblin, whale, etc.
Problem was every time we got a new box we had to try to find a faster shark -- we started associating speed of shark with speed of machine.
My new box is called shawk, in homage to the Shawk Hater's Club.
Back at Michigan, some machines were named after infomercials. "psychicfriendsnetwork" etc.
Others I have seen/used: The Simpsons, Beatles and HHGTTG.
Sometimes, I just use 1, 2, 3, ...
I've always used place names. During the 80s, I worked for a company that imported Gucci and Fendi, and I named their computers (Prime superminis!) MILANO, TORINO, and VENEZIA.
The shop I ran in Colorado, the servers were named Frisco, Leadville, Boulder, Aspen, etc. This led to a lot of crude jokes pointed at the developer whose wife was named Aspen.
All of the machines in my home are named after Shadowfist cards, mostly feng shui sites: the_hub, proving_ground, kinoshita_house, inner_sanctum, and this machine here is quantum_sorcery.
The last time I used Melvyl, the University of California's online card catalog, I saw, in some response, a server named cerise.dla.berkeley.edu or some such. Which startled me, because I remember a friend of mine who worked at the Division of Library Automation showing me the list of colors that he'd compiled for server names, and that was in 1980.
After getting tired of trying to think of new names, I finally came on a near-infinite list which is easy to remember. I've started naming my computers after different beers. I'm not sure how well this would be approved in a work setting, but there are plenty of obscure beer names which would slip under the radar.
Some names I have used: Stella Heineken Amstel Grolsch Kwak Leffe Duvel Speights Emersons Tiger Kingfisher
This naming scheme prevents mangagement from getting involved. If you really want to make their day encode the numbers in binary.
I've taken to using German words that have to do with trains from this dictionary:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080214100631/>
You have to use the wayback machine since these guys took the page down.
I've got some really classic names like:
funkenfanger krankenwagen bogen bremsprobe druckluft
They really sound like they mean business! I've got to say using the periodic table so that you can recall the IP address is a good idea too.
2 servers hosting a web app were named Bert and Ernie. The idea caught on with all new machines getting a seasame street character name. I called my pc Elmo.
I once named the firewall at a particularly hellish company Cerebrus.
And at a small company, where we only had "the server" I named it Alfred, after Bruce Wayne's butler.
At home I use Danish cities that have a national-level womens handball team. So far i got to VIBORG and GUDME. Later on I could use for example AALBORG, SILKEBORG, SKJERN or RINGSTED.
In case I should run out I could always add lower level teams as well! :)
I use Zodiac signs [1] for my home (small, obviously) network. A friend used character names from the Goon Show [2], which I wish I'd thought of first :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac#Western_zodiacA few weeks ago I encountered the ultimate server name while working with the servers of the AFIP [My Nation Organization for Tax Collecting].
If you happen to ping those servers concerning the WebServices that validate bills, the server that get backs to you is avaricia.afip.gov, that is to say greed.afip.gov.
We did artists:
Years ago, I worked for a school district. When we got around to renaming the servers as part of an effort to bring the entire district into a single Windows NT Domain, we named the servers using the Greek alphabet. Alpha was the PDC and Beta, Delta, and Gamma were BDCs (located at remote sites), there were also additional servers named according to availability and location (Lambda was the server for the library).
The machine that I sat at had Windows 2000 Server on it. It was named Xi.
I can't believe nobody else wants to name their server Cortana!
I worked for one project where the admins were "Trekists" (their term) and gave the database servers "Starship Enterprise" numbers in order of acquisition NCC-1701 through NCC-1701-C (I left the company before D and E were created)
When I started another project we were going to name the servers after planets, but the only one that had an obvious name was the tape backup machine (Uranus) As soon as the boss heard someone yelling "take the tape out of Uranus" we had to rename the boxes.
Now we have boring names like Web-01, App-01, DB-01 and Mail-01
Characters from Austin Powers....
Members of classic rock bands:
ZZZ_.... (as every server in Nortel) and then... ZZZ_SomebodyFindThisOneAndShutItDown
We use solar system planets: pluto, mars, earth, etc. Didn't run out of names yet :)
In Japan you have Gundam and Ultraman characters
One ISP I worked at had the four south park kids, and yes, Kenny kept dying.
Also, my school had all the labs themed with different names for each machine. One was the star wars room where you could work on Anakin, C-3P0, R2D2, etc. Another was the Tolkein room with Frodo, Gandalf, and the like. If I remember right, we had the servers in the server room named after the ancient roman gods, though that was a while ago and I can't be sure of my memory on the servers (only saw them once or twice).
It must be Dan Bernsteins' "cr.yp.to".
Our latest batch of servers have been given beer names: Molson, Kingfisher, Corona, Spitfire, etc. This has the advantage that there are plenty to choose from.
Previously we have had software development machines named for stars: Rigel, Sirius, Algol, etc. Plenty of those too.
CAD Workstations were named for rivers: from the exotic like Limpopo to the more local like Thames and Severn. The backup server for these was Clyde, when it was later mirrored, its companion was called Bonnie.
Going way back, we once had just two DEC VAX-11/750s, one for development (DEVVAX) and one for pattern preparation used by the marketing department (MKTVAX). These were later replaced by MicroVAXen called DADVAX and MUMVAX. These were added to gradually, creating a cluster, but the children were given the prosaic names of AMVVAX, BMVVAX, etc.
I name all of my machines with some sort of Beatles reference.
My PC is Revolver, my laptop is Walrus, etc.
I've also seen Roman Gods used, or characters from LOST :)
My undergrad school had 4 student servers named: 'earth', 'wind', 'and', and 'fire'. The 'and' machine was only used for long-running jobs
My current scheme is candy: desktop - skittles, laptop - twix, server - rolo, old desktop - snickers.
Simpsons at the office which someone already offered up.
But Peanuts characters at home, which was inspired by my wife who started including Chuck in my list of nicknames. Schroder, Chuck, Patty, Marcie, Linus, etc.
Our first server was named Dylan, the sysadm intended to name the rest hendrix, page etc.
Unfortunately the next one was named Zebedee by somebody more at home with kids cartoons
than rock greats, they continued with Ermintrude, Dougal etc.
(for UK readers in their 30s)
I worked at a library software (i.e. bibliographic) company and we named some servers after authors: Shakespeare, Dickens, etc.
Cool thread....
We use cosmological names and started with ones like Jupiter,Pluto,Stellar,Hubble,Venus But eventually it became a contest of sorts - more obscure the better.
My favorites: Mars our dev sql server died, so I rebuilt it as - Vulcan ;)
Our billing, time & attendance server - Io. (as in Input/Output)
Our web server - Oort
A colleague at a place long ago started using the names of people who'd left. At the time, the Unixen tended to be also-rans as it was a bank with a number of mainframes, so he got away with it for a long time.
The company which bought ours had a couple of 'standards', one of which was greek heroes and gods. Unfortunately, this came unstuck when one server was finally name Hercules. Because someone named the next server Xena. :-) The architect of the naming screen was not impressed...
The laptop I was issued at work is named "twoyearslate" because that's how long it took them to issue it to me after my start date. At home my machines are all named after parts of the Borg Unimatrix from Star Trek: Voyager.
Our first server is named: Rivendell
Bought when the first Lord Of The Rings movie came out, you can guess the brand yourself.
Another server is named Devel, it runs our version control and other development related services. Naturally it is referenced internally as devil.
Our computers have animal names Here are a few of them
My university's CS lab used famous mathematicians.
In my previous company we used names of US colleges as server names.
I don't think you will run out of server option very soon if you go down this option.
We had Clusters of machines. Each cluster with a main machine and then a set of machines used by the cluster:
Snow-White
Mushroom
At another locations we name the machines after lakes:
In my current company, our servers are not named according to any defined scheme but there are some interesting names like
Email Server = Cheetah
Build Server = Bob the Builder
DevServer = Digger etc
Then there are other names like IGUANA, BAYBERRY, CHAMELEON, COBRA, DRAGON etc (Our network admin likes Animals for sure)
At my old company, all the workstations were named to the names of the rivers around the world and every new person who joined the company had to choose an unused river-name from around the world for his machine. That really helped us increase our knowledge about rivers around the world :)
Our organization has servers which represent a body of mythical and real creatures with long arms.
We have the following:
A new server is on the cards and it might be christened as KALI ( A Hindu goddess with multiple arms ).
A previous company named servers after elements in the periodic table. We also had star names for our larger servers (they were Sun servers so that might have something to do with it!)
I used to have an x-files theme for my computers and servers at home (Mulder, Scully, Cancerman, Skinner, Deepthroat, and even Krycek) but more recently I moved over to a LOST theme with Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Locke, Hurley, and Sayid.
At a company I used to work for, the database servers were named after iconic musicians. I can remember two of them being "Iggy" and "Ozzy". Some of the public servers were named after South Park characters, and a couple of others were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
HAL,MIR,Apollo,Sputnik,Aryabhatta and similarly named space crafts.
Census all spacecrafts ever launched [1]
[1] http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/Spacecrafts-index.htmlAll of my servers and devices are named after planes of existence from mythology (and specifically D&D source books). Funny thing is my longest running server which up until I added a NAS (aptly named "hell") is named "abyss".
The machines in my wife's store are named after constellations ("cassiopeia", what a pain to remember to spell correctly).
My professor's server at college was named Satnet.
I worked for a company that used to have the same name as an extremely famous computer industry company (I'll say it was "IBM" although it was really a different company) until that company finally sued and forced my company to change its name. When I worked there the company's domain was still IBM (so you'd log on each day as "IBM\myname"), and all the servers were named IBM1, IBM2 etc.
My home network uses a car theme, as I'm a bit of a car nut:
The new Macbook I'm getting in a few weeks will probably be Fisker or Lotus. If I were getting one of the crazy expensive ones I'd name it Veyron or Spyker, but alas, that is not meant to be.
My girlfriend broke the scheme when she moved in. I believe her stuff is named after Shakespearean works ...
Obviously, our work network uses a more staid scheme. In ye olden dayes, prior to the new network team about 5 or 6 years ago, our servers were all named for basketball teams. (In fact, one still is: KINGS. But only because renaming it would be a PITA for various reasons.)
A couple years ago I was a developer for Rhino Video Games and we named our servers after video game characters so we had:
We were going to add another, which would have been SamusServer. Too bad Gamestop bought us out before we had a chance to add another server..
Mine are named after pets I had when I got them.
Halftone, Bubba, Angus, Pumpkin...
DEC was (in)famous for using Stars (astronomical, you know, like the sun?):
A previous company used "bears":
Another former company used Mythological Monsters for Servers and Fish for clients:
Clients
Names from the 80s cartoon Trapdoor (berk, drutt, boney,...)
I work for a bank, therefore the names are incredibly cryptic and forgettable.
My university used oceans for Unix servers and seas for Linux servers.
For example, some Unix servers: Arctic, Pacific
Some Linux servers: Black, Adriatic.
We also had labs with similar names for the machines, which made for easy reference when setting up meetings.
We had a "Simpsons" lab, with machine names like Homer, Marge, Carl, Wolfcastle, McClure etc
We also had a "Bone" lab with names like Fibula, Femur, Clavicle, etc.
Maybe I had too much greek mythology at school, but I name my computers after greek gods, nymphs and such. Posting from hermes.olymp right now :-)
My home server (whatever incarnation of it was alive at the time) has been named "deepthought" for years. My desktop/laptop machines are generally named after the car model and year I was driving at the time I bought the computer (e.g. Firebird87, Mustang07).
My college had two labs that I can recall... one had computers named after insects, the other named after wine grapes.
My personal computers come from LotR/Simarillion. E.g., my current machine is Finarfin. My prior desktop was Gandalf; the prior one was Pippin. Etc.
At school, the servers are Futurama planets. E.g., Wormulon.
The company I work for has a simple policy: computer names start with the letter "p". E.g. Pea, Prejudice, Preserver, Pickle etc. As we are nearing 300+ machines I expect necessity will force inventiveness...
We name our servers by Sesame Street characters and our desktops/ laptops by muppets.
Also, I've used the London underground system as a naming convention before:
I had server in a large black tower case I just had to name Lugbúrz [1]. I probably should have mounted a web cam on top of it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LugburzOne of the most unique names I've come across was at my 1st job out of college. There were eight of us crammed into a very small office space. The "data center" was actually a small closet which also served as a walk way to the company in the offices next door. When I was given the 1 minute tour of our facilities, I saw one machine under a desk in the "data center" with a photo copied picture of the head of a turtle taped to the side, poking out a few inches.
If you hadn't guessed already, the name of the server was "FatBastard".
Skynet, Sarah, John, Terminator..
I like to use bands:
Deftones Soulfly Pennywise NoFx Marley Coldplay Nirvana EazyE etc
We once set up two web servers a place i worked, one main server and a backup server as a failover.
The main server was named "Burns" and the backup server "Smithers"
we used IABTA codes for the servers. Although i think from now on I will ensure all my servers are binary names i'd love to see the confusion on a non-techy persons face when you tell them that server 8 is stuffed and type in 00001000 to terminal service to it.
I use whisky brands like "Logan", "Jameson", "Cardhu", etc...
Whenever I run out of knowledge I just drink a bit more from Wikipedia [1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_whisky_brandsI like prison names.
As far as naming schemes go, I like to go for NBA players, (though the concept extends any sort of athlete.) They have the nice property of being grouped by team, and they have enough variability that one can use sports knowledge to infer relationships between entities. e.g. Garnett, Pierce, and Allen fit under the Celtics domain; Artest for a server that's not particularly stable etc.
I once worked at a company that used street names in Chicago:
Can't remember the others.
Also, we had a build server once named "elvis" - because it took forever to acquire the serer though purchasing...so onece, when someone on the team asked about it, purchasing said something like "we have heard that is in the building" - thus the "Elvis is in the building..." / "Elvis has left the building..." pun.
I used to work for a place where the servers were all named for famous serial killers:
Rock band names: Metallica, Cult, Manowar, Tiamat etc. Also, VM image names are known songs of these.
We used superheroes name before. I think I'm Flash. Personally I like to name my computer and others as Isotope, Uranium, .
At my university one of the research groups named one of their clusters after Scotch whiskies, partly because there are so many so they weren't going to run out, but mainly because with names like Bunnahabhain, Laphroaig, Bruichladdich and so on, people weren't going to randomly stumble across them with dictionary attacks ...
Hotels in Las Vegas. Our main file server was Bellagio. Development webserver was Venetian. My laptop was Mirage. GoldenNugget was a little bit long.
For diverse server sets, I recommend the attractions of Epcot Center, circa 1986 [1]:
Combine these with the Prototype [2] font set and the IconFactory Epcot Network Nodes [3] icon set and you've got a server theme with visual identifiers ready to go!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epcot_attraction_and_entertainment_history#Past_Future_World_attractionsWe use our college mascots.
We are geologists, so servers are named after big geological objects: pluton, kraton
Minerals, sometimes rocks, are used for desktops, e.g. quarz, almandin, zirkon, mica, silt.
Notebooks got jurassic series, which are a rather finite resource (lias, dogger, malm), so right now we're exploring the rest of the mesozoic…
My college used dog names for the server-names, we called it dog-net.
etc....
In my company most servers have cities/states names:
and so on.
But I worked on a company where all the server had snake species names.
From Lovecraft, but only 5 characters long (they had to be 8 chars, and prefixed with SV-):
SV-DAGON, SV-RLYEH
No one could remember SV-RLYEH... They kept asking why we named it that way. Since we speak French at the office, the answer was "Parce qu'il est rlyeh au réseau", a play on "relié", literally "because it is connected to the network".
The server ops group at a place I worked had 2 monitoring servers. Scooby and ScoobyDeux.
i use neighborhoods in new york, starting queens: whitestone, flushing, astoria
A couple of years ago a rival opposition party at the Vienna university of technology accused the student union of being communist. Since then the student union made a point of naming all their servers and workstations after communist politicians or soviet space craft:
politicians:
space craft:
I name my servers after old-time gangsters:
Bugsy, Rocco, Scarface, Lucky, Lefty, Mouthpiece (the phone server), and Kraco (from ST-tos "A Piece of the Action")
of course, they're all in the alcatraz domain
Probably not very original, but I use characters from Lord of the Rings:
If and when I ever run out of LOTR names, I plan to go on to the Silmarillion.
The two main file/print servers: Alfred and Jeeves.
The database and mail server: Cliff (Cliff Claven, the mailman from Cheers who knew everything).
Our two redundant web servers: Venus and Serena.
The all purpose "load all other apps onto this server" server: Jack (Jack of all trades).
We thought we were very clever.
We use trees. Oak, Maple... ect... :-)
At a previous job the network admins set up Conan, the compute server. Always made me chuckle.
Project-2501
At my place of employment, we have 3 servers in our local office named Shrek, Mickey, and Pluto.
Back with the first PC network I had, we used the Top Gun characters for server names. (Viper, Maverick, Goose, Hollywood, Iceman, etc.) The story of that naming scheme actually made it into the Wall Street Journal! :-)
Our build machine is named DELLBERT... it's about the last surviving server that has an interesting name. All the others are predictable, like UATWEB2, QADB4, etc.
U. Michigan's CAEN [1] had some great ones. There was one that was all colors: blue, maize, green, red, etc... and plaid.
[1] http://www.engin.umich.edu/caen/The current environment I'm in has two great names that leave you with only one question = WHY??
CCLAPTRAPS1
HOTDRINKS1
However my all time favourite is still from a workplace that liked to use planets and then had to move on to stars, etc.
They had avoided one plantet name for many reasons but finally the day came when it was just TOO good to be true!
The developers group needed 'their own box to play with and switch on or off whenever they wanted' (YES that was their words in the request). So said piece of equipment was ordered and when it arrived it was one of the first black IBM boxes (no computer beige) - that was the final vote for the name.
The perfect little black box called URANUS was born.
I use dead latin american revolutionaries.
At my company, I named all the workstations after Royal Caribbean cruise ships:
Plus, we have 2 servers:
On the other hand, I name my own computers (and hard drives) after the characters from The Fifth Element:
At college ours are named after the Simpsons characters, so
Lenny Marge Bart Lisa Moe Barney
etc
We used the 7 sins - Gluttony, Sloth, Greed, Wrath, Pride...
Ok, 5 of them anyways
vms servers - birds of prey - falcon/hawk/condor...
microvaxes - birds - robin/jay...
unix boxes - fish - pilchard/piranha/wahoo...
AIX box - fake animals - cabbit.... I am waiting for jackalope to be installed.
linux box - minerals - pycnite
we have a windows server that is named after a body part.
Far too much time has been spent in meetings picking names.
My favorite is planet and galaxy names.
What use are cute names if you (1) have to rack your brain to come up with a new one andd (2) have to rack your brain to remember which server that name is for?
I guess it depends on the size of your group. I'm in an I.S. department of about a hundred people serving a company of over 6,000 with six major facilities and upteen small ones. Our server names have two digits for which data center, then sequential. And we are wishing we'd planned ahead and numbered them by rack and slot. Our PC names are two letters for building, two letters for department, and then sequential numbers.
We do have mnemonic DNS entries for applications that run on those servers, however.
I use two different naming schemes
"Physical" servers and related systems are given baseball-related names.
"Virtual" (Virtual Machine) servers are given names after the U.S. National Parks.
I use historical ballpark names for things like storage arrays.
Now - the completely whack thing is when I started subconsciously moving services to the servers with similar personalities to the players (long running processes on the "ripken" server - or database services on "campanella" etc. )
We have a naming scheme at work loosely based around Scotch whisky distilleries, e.g. http://www.scotchwhisky.net/distilleries/index.php I say loosely because a few upstart American employees thought they'd continue the trend to things like "wild turkey".
We just bought a pair of Dell R900s to do a virtualization pilot. Two Xeon Quad Core Procs and 32 GB of RAM a piece. Eventually we will upgrade to 4 Six Core Xeons and boost the RAM to its max with the ultimate goal of migrating all of our services to VMs (replacing over 30 physical machines in the process). Their names:
Unicron and Galactus
At one former employer, we were using alternate names of colors : nacarat (red), sinople (green), avorio (ivory black or white), oscuro (quasi-black, production), kuro (black in japanese, development), etc.
Another use is japanese names for fruits, flowers and generally vegetables : Daikon, Bashoo, etc.
My current employer is a fan of obscure, untranslatable and really stupid jokes : rhesus, sphynx, hiaa, etc. (and no, I will not explain them, shall I do, shame will happen)
Personnally, since I'm a pen and paper RPG fan, I follow the list of the names of powers in the Nobilis settings : Parasiel, Ianthe, Vyasa, Ataris, etc.
Man, I wish I worked for some of those companies that seem to be upbeat enough to name their servers accordingly.
Our company is strict in its naming convention, ALL computers even servers are named the same way.
{0}-{1}-{2}
0. = (3 Letter Location)
1. = (Username or Server Type (IIS, SQL, Exchange)
2. = (2 Letter machine type (VM - Virtual, WK - Workstation, SV - Server)
Bizotto ( a protmonteau of Beer & Rizotto) Snake; Amour; Beast, HisWords(based on the Diaily Show short of "Don't listen to the facts, listen to His Words).
The latter will bring down the whole network if Klaatu is not alive.
I am going to socially engineer the hacking of your machines now that I have your server names, your common user names, user profiles, and hopefully you listed a web page with even more info...
Signs of the Zodiac:
Aries
Taurus
Gemini
Cancer
Leo
Virgo
Libra
Scorpio
Sagittarius
Capricorn
Aquarius
Pisces
I like names of trees:
fruit trees work too:
I used to name my computers after animals (leopard, cheetah, zebra, etc.) but I have since switched to rocks/gems.
We work in Shepton Mallet, Uk which has the countries oldest Jail, so our servers are named after other Jails/Prisoners: e.g. Barlinnie, Holloway, Strangeways, Azkaban,
with NAS devices Ronnie & Reggie (the Kray twins)
Name of Vulcans, Palikea, Mitsikeli..
We named our VAX computers after vacuum cleaners (vacs, get it?).
The best name for a Unix machine was filter-queen, after that it was more boring eureka, hoover, kirby, etc.
Spaceballs [1] - the movie, character names
DarkHelmet
LoneStarr
KernelSandurz
Barfolemew
Vespa
Skroob
Yogurt
Valium
We name our servers after species that are endangered, like
Bettong Tinamou Grebe
etc.
I think it is very cool :)
We use the names of spiders:
at home i use names of adventures characters for my computers. so far i have simon the sorcerer, guybrush threepwood and zak mckracken.
I like geographical related server names, then you can point to areas on a real map related to server functions.
When I was a volunteer at one of the presidential campaigns this year, our servers were named for Red Sox players and stadiums, Shae, Manny, Big Pape, Comisky, Wrigley...
Boring I know but we name ours after character's in Seinfeld.
I've used the following over the years: Gemstones and Minerals: Ruby, Diamond, Emerald... Greek Alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta ... Army Phonetic Alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo... Military Planes: Blackbird, Falcon, Eagle, Thunderbolt Stupid, Stupid names based on Serial nuimbers: COMPANYINITIALS-AB123456
I've used the following schemes over the years:
Many years ago i worked for a small shop. The owner used to live on Eagle street, so his first server was named Eagle1. The trend became to name servers after birds (Condor, Falcon, etc.) Shortly after that, someone named their workstation after cartoon birds and that quickly followed. I chose "Scrooge" for "Scrooge McDuck". One day a client called me to report a problem with his website. I uploaded the files, but the path to the image was hard coded from it being on my PC and I had to explain to him why "Scrooge" was part of the naming convention in his files and that it didn't refer to him.
After explaining to a future boss my story about "Scrooge" when we were deciding on server nomenclature, we decided to stay with something a little more professional. We went with rights as american citizens (pre-bush)....
Tux + Toxicity = Tuxicity
Mutter, Grossmutter, Übermutter, Leihmutter, Mutterkuchen, Butterkuchen - servers hosting virtual machines
Printers: Names of Artsists --> Kandinsky, Picasso, Dali, Rubens
Servers: Pulp Fiction Characters --> Vincent, Marsellus
We name our boxes after creatures from monster island.
We used to name our servers after characters in futurama. Our fileserver was callled planet express.
We used the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (things in brackets are the serever names):
We're on to our 3rd server named after the Great Pyramid, so we've used all three names.
The one that stumped us was the last one. No one wants to type it in. So we used it for the fax server, which because of the software hides the name from all the users.
When we added more servers we had lots of other things that aren't official wonders that we thought should count: Stonehenge, Sphinx, Colosseum, stuff like that.
Then we got bored and started using Egyptian gods (Anubis, Horace, Set, Ptah and so on). A lot of them are hard to pronounce, so we've moved on to Norse gods. I think we have a Thor, a Loki and an Odin.
we use particle names :) like muon, boson, tau lepton :)
we currently have Remus and Romulus!
I've used the characters from Scooby Doo in the past:
Scooby Scrappy Velma (domain server) Fred Shaggy Mystery Machine (file server)
Star Trek is also a good choice. My current laptop is Enterprise.
we had servers named after matrix characters: neo, morpheus, and trinity.
I use Native Australian Animals
KOALA and DINGO were easy, as was WOMBAT KANGAROO and WALLABY were the next up Going further you need to get more creative ECHIDNA and BILBY were the next two.
I'm going to have to start re-educating myself on fauna when I get another machine.
I used to have, and still using some of these Japanese food names: 1. Wasabi 2. Sushi 3. Sashimi
We had a server named "Neutered" and nobody knew why (I work at a student run division of a major University IT department, so students come and go constantly). It turned out we had formally named servers after SNL characters (Ferrell, Sandler, Spade, Meyers, etc.) and Neutered was the replacement for Spade.
The original three servers at my office (before my time) were called Moe Larry and Curly. But then they had to get another one, which was better than all the rest, so they called it SuperMoe.
That always struck me as an odd concept. Would make a sweet halloween costume. Now, stop reading this and get busy you jugheads! Push buttons!
The server/PCs at my house are named after the X-MEN Collosus, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, Storm, Phoenix ...
I reverted to the boring descriptive names schemes. Originally, I named some servers after Computer games, but at some point it get's hard to memorize what roles Murky [1], Gordon [2], Denton [3], Valentine [4] or Alucard [5] actually have, so I reverted to "Dev", "PdcSql" etc. Part of that might be that they are all Virtual Machines for Development and Testing, so I think I am just not emotionally attached to them.
But still, my own PC is and will most likely always be named Millenia [6].
[1] http://www.wowwiki.com/Blue_Murloc_EggI worked once where the entire network was named after Smurf characters. Not having been weened on the blue annoyances, I was at a complete loss, however it did make sense the Domain controller was PapaSmurf and the FTP on the DMZ was Gargamel (sp?).
I use name of important musicians, bach, mozart, etc. I'm very unlikely to run out of names.
I know someone who names after marketing failures. newcoke, edsel, betamax, etc.
I once worked at a Minnesota company whose coders named their computers after local lakes, many of which had names coming from the local native languages. Waconia, Minnetonka, Wayzata, Calhoun, Harriet, Nokomis, Hiawatha, etc. Of course, our server was Superior.
At Texas Instruments long ago we tried to name our servers, but we were told it was 'unprofessional' and had to use acronyms. We were at the Forest Lane facility. Two of the systems were named FLOPN1 and FLOPN2 for 'Forest Lane Open 1' and 'Forest Lane Open 2'.
The engineers immediately began referring to them as "floppin' one" and "floppin' two". You can imagine all of the jokes... I got yer floppin' one right here ...
I'm amazed no-one else has mentioned RFC2100 [1]:
The Naming of Hosts is a difficult matter, It isn't just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a host must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the users use daily, Such as venus, athena, and cisco, and ames, Such as titan or sirius, hobbes or europa-- All of them sensible everyday names.
...and so on.
(At work we use characters from Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books. There was a bit of a battle over whether our integration machine should be called Leibniz or Newton.)
[1] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2100.htmlIn my ex-company, we used food names for server names, e.g. satay, bulgogi, pancake, etc. At home, I use girl's names like kate, kimmy, jen, ..
yc
I use Chaos. Consequently, I've rolled my own management app (to automate control of django and php deployments) called Control.
out of contempt to the 08 election I started naming my servers: -JoeSixPac -JoeThePlumber -TitoTheBuilder ...
NFS servers named notresponding and stilltrying.
In case of network problem server will log something like this:
server notresponding not responding, still trying
server stilltrying not responding, still trying
