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.
At home: Real names. Currently I have Sadie (dekstop) & Jason (laptop). First name that pops into my head becomes the computers name. I occasionally rename them upon formatting.
At work: Moons. Mine is Oberon (one of the moons of Uranus.)
Our device family (iPod, computers) includes Nietzsche, Lennon, and Zappa. The musician/philosopher theme is intentional, and will probably stick.
The first ISP I worked at had servers named after metals (gold, steel, bronze, etc). It was kind of cool to have my desktop named iron.
I’ve found companies use this kind of cool naming scheme until they have more than about 10 machines to keep track of — at that point it becomes easier to name them something that relates to what they’re doing. That way when one blows up you don’t have to work as hard to remember whether it’s the mail server or the DB server.
This is especially true when you have multiple servers of a certain type, and exacerbated by the need for Prod/Staging/QA/Dev environments that all look the same, and virtualization — name the physical host, then name each VM….
I name myt computers after Charlie & the Chocolate Factory characters. It started with Augustus, which was named that because we acquired it in August, but then the theme changed.
It’s pretty bookish and twee, but I name all of our devices (computers and iPods, currently) after Shakespeare characters. I try to go with the women and minor men. I’m writing this on Desdemona, with Osric the dodgy iPod close at hand.
Hi! yes I visit here now sometimes! I used to be hugely nerdy as a teenager and had servers and things named after obscure planets and solar systems etc., but that was shortlived.
I have since wisely gotten rid of/colocated/virtualized/consolidated/smashed the silly amount of servers I had, but the few that remain still have sin names:
After that I started naming everything after the seven deadly sins, after reading some philosophy books that I really enjoyed on the subject, (and later seeing the movie se7en). After I ran out of the initial 7 I started making up new ones
envy – desktop which used to be considered high-end
lust – laptop which used to be considered high-end
greed – storage server with many harddrives
wrath – unix box doing firewall/intrusion/etc. security things
sloth – a very slow test/vmware server
pride – unix server that I’ve put a gay man in charge of
gluttony – another pos laptop
I’ve had several conventions, from different employers. one had a convention of using the names of mountains from the pacific coastal range, such as Whistler, Baker, Rainer, and Shasta. It wasn’t my naming convention. The last one that *was mine, we used the names of deities from several different mythos. So we had Zeus, Remus, Isis, Loki, and we even had a server named Mukuru (from the Herero bushmen of Namibia)
At work: www1 through wwwN, dev, devvm, xmpp, db. Boring but effective.
My personal computers have always had names of non-human characters from books: wintermute (yes, me and everyone’s mother have used that one before), shadowfax, etc
I use Egyptian gods on my network… Isis, Anubis, Ra, Horus, Osiris, etc. Haven’t started naming the devices yet.
Got to agree that when you get enough servers, it kind of gets silly.
Hmm. I never really thought of my non-server device names (for the Macbook, the two iPods, etc.). I know my Tivo shows up on the network as tivo dash a-whole-bunch-of-numbers. The iPod Touch used to be named Touchy but jailbreaking it seemed to reset the naming scheme. And I have no idea how to change the hostname of my Macbook.
Wow, this blog post was total comment-whoring.
Huh, just like Jeremy @7, I’ve worked at places where the computers were named after mountains in BC (not just the coastal range) and at my current job, it’s mythical creatures/characters (not necessarily deities, but not excluding … so we have Wyvern, Apollo, Zeus, Kraken, etc). Weird.
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Well, let’s see.
In keeping with the musician theme at home, I’ve named my work laptop (which I’m allowed to name whatever I want) Claypool, although work’s original name for it was the charming CA-AN-13306.
At work, there are a few naming conventions. Our pairing stations are named after different types of pears, like seckel / crunch, or pairs, like twisted / bouncy. Workstations used to be named after tools, like incline, drill, skewer, excavator. The manager of one team has a real thing for Star Wars, so you’ve got everything from Threepio and Anakin to Riven and Sidious.
The scheme my ISP uses is pretty neat – most of their old servers are named after Vancouver streets. Harwood, Barclay, Jervis, and of course, my website’s home, Thurlow.
I’m lame; my last theme was literary:
Dante
Poe
Homer (d’oh! No, not that Homer, the ancient one)
I named the laptop Hobbes (because it ran OS X Tiger at the time).
My best friend used the marines from Aliens, and I am deeply, deeply annoyed that I didn’t think of it first: Vasquez, Hudson, Hicks, Apone, etc.
I’d never admit to being lame. Boring… maybe.
At home and work I’ve always just based the ‘puter name on person names: janpc, joelaptop, etc. (Got annoyed at IT department the few times I’ve reinstalled a machine on my (current) work network: You can’t reuse the same name for the new installation (because the old name is cached in the Active Directory or something like that))
At university the server names were themed: Star Trek characters, Star Wars characters, etc. Each generation of machine had a new theme.
How do you name your WIFI hotspots? I just came across this tweet from Anil Dash:
My first PowerBook (a 12″ G4) was “Gray Matter 2.1″ and my current (a 15″ G4) is “Gray Matter 2.2″. I named my backup disk “Infinity Drive.” My ancient desktop pc, that I sold to a friend, I called “Superimposition.”
The first machine I got to name at my first job became rocannon after the planet in Ursula LeGuin’s first novel. I figured a theme of fictional planets would keep me going for a while, but the company went under soon after that.
My current place used gods when I started which looks pretty common from what others have said here. Now I have servers like “iqhseb5a” and my desktop is “iqd0030c” and my userid is younje00. What I get for working for a company with 400K employees.
Home machines are random and I’m not even sure what their names are. Oh, the iBook is called “funnel” since it’s mostly just an internet spigot (spigot would be a good name.) The imac appears to be called “jeffs-imac”. Dang, now I have to figure out how to change it.
At one company I worked for, all the laptops were named after soviet-era space hardware, i.e. Sputnik, Vostok, Buran, Luna, Salyut, Mir etc. The naming scheme fell apart once we had more laptops that names.
I’ve never been one to name inanimate objects — computers, cars, etc. Just not my thing. When I have to it’s like what I’m typing on now: “Penmachine iPod Touch.”
Yeah, boring I know.
At my previous company, we named our servers after the west coast islands. For instance Galiano, Denman, Valdes. My boss enjoyed sailing the Georgia Straight, and this was a way for him to bring his hobby to work I guess. The names are nice, but they really did not help you group machines by role at all.
At my current company, we name servers that have similar functions elements in the same column of the periodic table. So you have machines named after the noble gases, the Akali metals etc. It gives them more interesting names, and they have an implicit grouping which can be handy and educational!
At one time our computers at work were named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Hardly original, but as you can guess that was in the early 90s. Now it’s 1, 2, 3, etc… booooooring……
Past and current computer names:
Amanda (Boston song)
Ivanova (Babylon 5)
Amidala (work laptop, c. 1999, showing my Star Wars geekiness)
Deathstar (work workstation in the earlier part of this decade…another Star Wars choice)
Padme (home desktop which died ingloriously, as I fried it by misconnecting power to a hard drive I was installing…and another Star Wars choice)
Hermione (the replacement for now in storage in Cupertino, CA)
Transducers (work workstation; didn’t name this one…has to do with what I do for a living)
CollectiveSoul (laptop for work that died last year)
FionaApple (my current laptop)
My Apple IIe clone never had a name, nor did my old 386.
At school we use the nearby islands (Ali did you work for UBC?) Denman, Galiano, etc.
My old place of work had various themes for different generations, I think they were phasing out the Simpsons when I started.
Most of my devices take on my name directly. My iPods and cell phone are called Damien. Once I bought my own computer at home (but still administered my parents’ and eventually my brother’s) I named the machines after the processor type/speed (e.g. Barton-2800). Recently after deciding it would be fun to anthropomorphise my computers I actually started giving them their own names. I decided to use Strong Bad’s naming convention so I have compy and lappy. I also have a server so its name is servy (which used to be called server0 even though I only have one).
I did like my Xbox’s name. When you first played LAN games on the original Xbox (maybe only with Halo) your Xbox would pick its own name from some pool. Mine chose Hambone.
My last company used Star Wars names: Anakin was a new, fast server, and Darth Vader was a very bad (and old) server that kept breaking down. Yoda was a small server for everybody’s files and backup, and no order whatsoever.
In the past at the university we started using chilean volcanoes names like, Juncal, Llaima, Antuco, Osorno, etc.. which beat the standart they had pucux01, pucux02, etc.
In a previous company we used cool musician names, I remember bowie, dylan and jagger as the ones I named.
My current employer has over 500 servers so cool names are not an option, and there are lots of server with blades and virtualization going on as well. My teams projects run on at least 40 different servers and I don’t know their names.
Strangely at home the linux server has a boring name and the iMac and NAS too, I think I need to change these back to cool musician names.
Thanks for the reminder.
Hey Damien
No I did not work at UBC, but the same sys admin who named the UBC computer science servers later worked at my company (WebCT) and followed the same naming scheme over again.
the field in the config interface is usually called ‘hostname’ so i took it literally and used game show hosts:
sajak
martindale
barker
philbin
woolery