I was watching a rerun of jPod last week, and in one scene some of the characters are walking through their server room at work. The cabinets are labeled with such names as “Mr. Belvedere”, “Punky”, “Webster”, “Gopher” and “Willis” (there were more, but I can’t remember any thank you, Tivo), all of them referring to characters from 80s TV shows.
I’ve noticed at the various places I’ve worked since university that it’s pretty common to name your servers something other than “firewall01″ and “webserver06″, but to come up with something more interesting. Also, sometimes there are themes where all servers in a local network will be names based on that theme (such as that 80s TV characters theme mentioned above). My last company, for example, had servers with nautical themes, because our websites sold boats. Another company used characters from The Simpsons.
Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any interesting naming of the servers at my current company, but the sysadmin asked me to name my reports server and I suggested “optimus” sort of as a joke. I don’t think our sysadmin has even seen Transformers, but I suppose it does sound cool anyways.
Otherwise, I haven’t had the chance to come up with any cool naming scheme, really; while I had two servers running at home, I named them Cylon and Baltar (sadly, Baltar died). But I have no reason to have multiple servers at home anymore, so I won’t get the chance to do any cool naming again anytime soon.
So, I’m curious, have any of you named your servers or computers anything strange or different? Any recurring theme between computers on the same network, or in the same home? I find it interesting to hear what people have picked, and what their choices might say about them.