Would a server by any other name be as functional?

noaa contract

On a noaa contract we had a server named lightning. We got 2 new servers, named them thunder and hail. thunder to match lightning and hail so I could tell everyone to go to hail.

Great Naming Scheme

You should have a machine in a DMZ named Mehmed2.

Server Names

The Republican National Committee used to name their servers with nicknames of Republican Presidents back in the late 1980's. Abe and Ike were two I know of. I'm not sure if they had a "Dick" for Richard Nixon, or if he was too sensitive a subject to have a server named for him.

Naming conventions

I guess the naming conventions bug bit me pretty hard as all of the groups of systems I've been responsible for over the years had something similar to what the author calls an "ecosystem".

The best one, IMHO, was based on the notion that test servers would be slower and less functional than production servers. The overarching theme was undersea creatures, production systems getting names like barracuda and test systems getting names like sponge, coral and my favorite, nudibranch.

It just so happens that nudibranch became the overall test server for orgs far and wide and I was questioned about the tastefulness of the name more than once.

No one ever forgot the name though...

Name those Mountains

As our company is located in Colorado, the servers are all named after the various 14ers (mountains > 14k feet). This was started by an admin a few years back who set up most of the servers and who's father was in the process of hiking all of the mountains.

Between Elbert, Massive, Challenger, Pyramid, Blanca, Crestone, and the rest of the gang, it's a bit of a hike (mentally) to keep them all straight. But darn if I don't hate Quandary some days.

I enjoy it

My favorite ever was a room full of linux workstations, all of which were named after animals. The last row held lion, tiger, bear and ohmy.

Stupid, stupid,

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Equating naming a server to naming the hard drives on your Mac. Yep, you were definitely an Arts student (read: student who gets a fake degree).

Cartoon servers

Years ago we named our servers for Warner Brothers Cartoon characters. Then HR found out and said we were being sexist because there were no female servers. We tried to explain that the servers were neither male nor female but they wouldn't hear of it.

We tried switching to Hanna-Barbera characters but they said we still were being sexist despite the fact we had three servers named after Josie and the Pussycats. (Josie was the main server and the other two backed her up. It made sense to us.)

We eventually ended up selecting names from Greek, Roman and Egyptian Mythology; plenty of females there. Each 'realm' covered a separate operating district and we thought everyone would be pleased.

We didn't have it in operation a month before we were asked to change it. It seems we had people who couldn't remember how to spell Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Ashtoreth, Aesculapius, etc.

They finally set a rule, servers shall be named of the form FileServer001, FileServer002, BackupServer001, DatabaseServer001, etc.

BOR-ING!

My work computer is Pinky.

My work computer is Pinky. NARF!

At my last job, we had a Top Gun theme. My computer was Iceman, the boss' was Maverick. One of our servers was Goose, but Goose crashed and burned.

More schemes

At a previous company, we had servers of various makes, each of which had its own "group". I remember the HP servers were all named after washing machine manufacturers - miele, creda, hotpoint et al.

My own machines are now named after characters in books that I particularly liked, such as helva, greyarea, tomas, sherlock. Gives me lots of scope!

R.

A small software company I

A small software company I once worked for owed much of its cash reserves (that helped it ride out the dotcom bust) to its owners having invested in Wizards of the Coast shortly before Pokemon cards hit it big. So there was -- despite nobody playing the games or being a fan of the cartoon -- a fair bit of Pokemon paraphernalia around the office.

Of course, all the machines were named for various Pokemon, mostly at random. I went through a succession of workstations including Metapod and Arcanine; when the main file server Pickachu was finally replaced, the new one was Raichu.

One of the few things I knew about Pokemon lore at that time (or since, really) was that each creature has a number as well as a name; sadly, the naming system was too entrenched to be changed when I suggested assigning IP addresses to match the names of each machine. ("That way if the DNS server breaks -- again -- you can just look at the poster on the fridge!")

Mail Servers

As a sysadmin I have always used naming conventions to keep track of my systems.

My favorite names were for our mail servers. We used newman, cliff, and mrmcfeely.

I've been through a number of them

My first company it was things that fly, though I sort of broke that with phantom and then really did it in with toontown. After that, it got weird.

More recently, at my current company, I started the naming convention of comic book characters with the win going to the QA environments of Mysterio, Magneto, and Mystique. When we got formal IT, their machines got exciting names like fs-srv, but the development machines are named by us and stay that way. It's interesting to note everybody struggles to remember the names of the IT machines, but not the development ones.

At home, being a geek, I have a network of 15 machines and all are named after species of cats (extinct and fictional are acceptable) since it fits with my domain. It works well, with high powered machines getting appropriate names and my color laser is "cheetah" because it's a sprinter...

In my opinion, the naming of machines effects the esprit de corps of the organization. Fun conventions reflect a good culture, boring reflects the world of staid time-pushers.

Naming convention

We have give three letter site designation representing the physical region followed by three letter function (i.e. svr for servers, wks for workstation, prt for printers, net for network devices) followed by 4 digit number. TORWKS0010 would designation Toronto Workstation number 10.

The 7 dwarfs

My old company, many, many moons ago had 7 sun 3 machines. I named them after the 7 dwarfs in Snow White. My boss was given the machine named "Dopey". I guess he had a sense of humor, he kept it for several years.

Tolkien names

I have always named my various development boxes after Tolkien names in Middle Earth. Of course, the Linux boxes get names like "bree" or "bagend", while the Windows boxes get names like "mirkwood" or "doom". For some reason, I've named laptops after characters like "gandalf" or "sam".

Best part was when my central server was named "rivendell" for a long time.

islands and chocolate

In the early days at an unnamed isp hosts were clustered by function and named compatibly such as:

the island groups. tahiti, solomon, canary. you get the idea.

and our db servers were all based on chocolate:
godiva, hershey, etc.

now I have totally boring names like dev1 and usnjldb and heck, I wish ops had more imagination. Oh well, the phb's don't know what they are missing.

Our Naming Scheme

At my son's school where I am a sysadmin, we named the servers using the books of the bible. Genesis, Exodus...
The apps server became Numbers because Leviticus was too much to type. We getting to roll a File server using Ubuntu, but the next one is Deuteronomy. Joshua is part of the lab machine sequence. Choose wisely with your naming scheme.

naming at home

I have done a Final Fantasy theme at home. Like many of you I try to come up with names that fit the role of the machine. The file server is named "savepoint" but I really can't think of anything for any of the others :). I named the WAP Rydia, but it doesn't make any sense. I suppose I could name it after one of the airships.

Any ideas!??!

I need names for:
laptop
WAP
Router / Firewall
Wife's machine
Media Center

Compound words

When I was at school, we got a new lab full of Sun machines. The workstations were all named for compound words involving 'sun' so we had burn, tan, stroke, drenched, light, screen, etc. etc.

Server named after fish

In our company, for a long time we named servers after fish. steelhead, sturgeon, walleye, king.

But the best was "crappy". None of our customers wanted to be on crappy.

Would a server by any other name be as functional?

For the past several years we have been naming all our servers for popular commedians. Windows domain controllers, for example, are Larry, Moe, and Curly. Seems apt, don't you think?

It is also interesting to

It is also interesting to see server names of countries/cities/things in foreign languages. Sadly since the names are usually restricted to USASCII we don't see some of the proper spellings.

Star Trek

At home my computers are named after Star Trek vessels like Enterprise, Voyager, Entrepid,... Base stations are called Deep Space 9 and Farpoint. The Start Trek universe is pretty large and there are lots of defined names. Ships belong to classes too so there is a possibility for two-tier.

Start Wars was a little limited but has grown in the last 10 years.

LoTR is also a favourite but most names are complex (take the dwarves for example).

Naming precedes computers

When I saw the link to this article on slashdot, I thought it was going to mention the origins of naming computers, but I was disappointed that it did not.

You probably are all too young to know that naming machines when you have a lot of them, such as in a factory, was a convention before computers ever existed. It helped people working on the machines distinguish which one they were talking about when they had dozens or hundreds of the same machine on the factory floor.

My theory is that this convention naturally carried over into the world of computing machinery.

Computer names

At U.C. Santa Cruz the acronym for the computing organization
was CATS, so the machines were named for famous cats.
Except the file servers for the Athena system were named
with Greek puns, like Ailurophile (cat lover),
Dendrophile (tree lover), etc.

At U.C. Berkeley they have a thing of naming things as
puns on celebrities. Thus the shuttle that runs between
the campus and the BART station is Humphrey Go-Bart.
Their first VAX machine was named Ernie Co-Vax.

I always wanted to have a mail server named Norman Mailer.

Celestial Bodies

Most of my machine names come from stars. The hardest part is picking a name that short and easy to spell.

Some over the years... Nova, Aurora, Polaris, Celaeno, and Orion. All my firewalls have been named Turais, it means 'little shield'.

The best machine name was my P6 FreeBSD server. It was held together with duct tape, had sharp edges, was black and safety orange. Hazard.

ServerNames

Company I work for uses Contellations. Gemini, UrsaMajor, UsraMinor, etc. Funny one when I started was mail server Pegasus.

microphones & flowers

I work at a radio station, and I name our work servers after microphone terminology - condenser, piezo, figure8 etc. At home, I go with flowers - daisy, clover, thistle

server names

Best server names were at a company I worked for years ago, UncleFester being the one that springs to mind.

laptop names

For our research we got many laptops, and I was the first one to pick the names. First we got three, so I named them after the three elven rings from lord of the rings: Narya, Nenya and Vilya. Later my advisor ordered a fourth one, that happened to have slightly better specifications.
I thought it would be just perfect to name that "theOne", and my advisor being a team player agreed, funny enough he ended up taking over the computer, and we didn't see it for more than one year and a half... and then one day (two weeks ago) it resurfaced, I thought that was very funny, just like the real one ring.
We got many others, the following 9 ones were named after the dwarf tribes, but.. we got two more and it didnt work anymore... so I eventually switched to a different theme, but it was fun for a while

Naming convention at past work

In the early 1990's I worked for a gaming company that named all the servers based on cartoon characters. Hence at the time there was "Ren", "Stimpy", "Buggs", etc. Also all the printers were named after dead rock stars. Hence we had "Cobain", "Lennon", "Elvis", etc.

Peanuts

All of the machines on my home network (laptops, printers, desktops, routers, cell phones, iPods, portable hard disks, Wii, PS3, etc.) are named after Peanuts characters. It all started 5 years ago with my laptop named Snoopy, and it's gone on since then. Unfortunately, I'm running out of names! :(

Host names

As a Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis fan, my naming convention of choice revolves around that series: SGC (domain controller), Gateroom (mail server), Puddlejumper## (laptops), SG-# (servers), Asgaard, Tokra, etc.

Before that, I had a thing about characters from The Hobbit...

Snow White and the seven dwarves

Back when I was a teenager we had a community computer lab with 8 public workstations, 1 administrator work station and a file/proxy server all on a windows domain. The domain was the 'EnchantedForest', the file server was 'EvilQueen' and the public workstations named after the seven dwarves and Snow White. The administrator work station had begun as 'PrinceCharming' but got renamed to just 'Prince' at some point.

Now a days at work at the University we stick with a more boring system, pretty much a 3 letter code (that no longer has much relevance to our department) and a number is what they've been using, though I have tried to shake it up a bit by naming any of our virtual machines using the host machine's name and a single word to describe its function.

n00b

The correct spelling is Kweopadwa you t00l