Three themes here, based on the interests of whoever built/installed them.
NT boxes:
Neptune
Triton
Orion
Apollo
At another site we have:
Enterprise
Voyager (ah-hem)
Plus Some others I can’t see from here but I think we can see where this is going…
Unix boxes:
Pebbles
Bambam
and the old Sequent that’s never had a name other than its IP address
So what are the names/themes chez vous? Anyone out there get to name theirs?
The biggest badest server around is always named “Thor”
**
Galaxy ** - Domain
**
Zaphod
Marvin
Trillian
Arthur
Hitchhiker
**
etc., etc., etc.
We’ve got:
Patty
Selma
Barney
Monty
Julius
Lionel
Edna
Seymour
Clancy
etc
Ours are named:
XXXX01
XXXX02
XXXX03
etc.
where XXXX is an acronym for our organizational name. The Powers That Be perfer that we not get too creative with server names.
Oh, and
Fred.
I have my very own
dustbunny
because it lives on the floor behind my desk.
I hear ya. We do include a few letters to indicate the location and purpose, but nothing as creative as some of the others mentioned.
I do have a Ghost server in my office. His name is Casper.
Crow
Servo
Cambot
Gypsy
Bobo
Brainguy
Didn’t use Mike, Joel, etc. because I didn’t want to get real names mixed in there.
Our department server is starlight.
The University I work for has one named Chastity, which cracks me up every time we get a service message saying “Chastity is down.”
Now:
Production: Screwtape
Backup: Wormwood
Before:
Production: Abbott
Backup: Costello
My home machines:
Bloom County (Linux server) (although I’m considering giving this a character name)
Opus (PowerMac G4)
Bill The Cat (PC)
Milo (PowerBook G3)
I need more machines to fill out the cast…
Server: Athena
Previous PC: Andromeda
New PC: Aphrodite
Router/Firewall: Cerberus
Next PC to get: Artemis
A few of the notable groups I found around here.
Other than the gratuitous Simpsons, Star Wars, Star Trek and Harry Potter references, we have:
Motorcycles
ducati
harley1
harley2
kawasaki
suzuki
yamaha
Elements. Yawn
helium
hydrogen
neon
lithium
mercury
oxygen
sodium
Medieval weapons
baldric
crossbow
excalibur
trefoil
Rock bands
aerosmith
inxs
ironmaiden
quietriot
ramones
Parts of a house
doorjamb
joist
lintel
mortar
mullion
plenum
plinth
soffit
Now for some “What were they thinking?!” ones - Who would name their server crash? That’s like someone naming a boat “sink.” We’ve also got one named ftp. But none named telnet, rlogin or ssh.
Sadly, most of the servers I deal with are boring xxxx#### things - wdsz3135 and so forth. The letters do have coded significance, which is useful as there are about 500 servers in this particular group, so we would have run out of clever names rather quickly.
At my main place of work, the file server is called Anthracite, the print server is called Graphite and I’m building the mail server at the moment, but haven’t decided on a name (it will be a mineral of some kind, possibly a gemstone). All the workstations have names on that theme.
At the other place (I support one or two days of the week), the server just has a boring [company]_srv name, but the existing workstations are named after biscuits(cookies); Digestive, Hobnob, Bourbon etc. I’m systematically replacing them with new hardware and the new naming scheme is cartoon characters (my choice, but I’m not entirely comfortable with it).
Since you’ve already got a couple of carbon minerals there, why not make the mail server Diamond?
Names in various places I haunt/have haunted:
Forms of silica: Chert, Flint, Porcellanite, Opal
Jazz names: Mingus, Ella, Chick, Dizzy, Django, Miles, Booker
Mountains: Everest, Rainier, Katahdin, Shasta, Vesuvius, Ararat
I also have a laptop named Samson and a desktop named Delilah.
I’m CIO at my company, and instituted a naming convention for all of our printers. Once I had used up the Greek alphabet, I switched to references to King Crimson albums:
Crimson
Poseidon
Lizard
Island
Larks
Starless
Red
Discipline
Beat
Three
Vrooom
Thrak
My tech staff took the ball and ran with it, naming any new server with something more creative than xxx_SRVnn (the previous convention):
Tiamat
Ogre
Troll
Gryphon
Dragon
etc…
Our CEO is a car nut.
Z8, M5, XKR. . .
:shakes head ruefully:
At my last college job, they were naming Real Computers after college admins. I inherited a Sun box that was named after a provost* who left after just one term. But the name turned out to be the same as a paternal aunt. So it’s replacement was named after a paternal uncle, etc.
That lead to my home computers being named after my mother and her siblings. But since there are only 7 of them, that’s clearly not enough, so I started using my maternal grandmother and her siblings’ names.
Warning: Going around saying “<name> died today” can lead to stunned reactions until you can explain that you’re talking about computers.
*The ex-provost has appeared twice in recent “Parade” magazines. I.e., a complete tool.
I personally don’t like cutsey or fan-based server names. If I’m working in a server room with 100+ servers I want my server names short and descriptive.
FS01
FS02
MAIL01
PDC01
SQL01
Many of you have much more fun names than what I have to put up with … a Disney theme. We have Daisy, Mickey, Pluto, Donald, Scrooge, etc. etc. etc. My life got much worse when Goofy died, and was replaced with Belle (of Hunchback of Notre Dame fame, I believe) … now, whenever directing non-tech people to temporary intranet pages on Belle, I have to spell it out every time, because otherwise they just type “Bell.”
If I made the decisions I’d name everything after Motown greats. Flo, Mary and Diana to start.