Don't call me Ishmael

Lack of imagination

I reinstalled my home machine recently and went for "PC". Sorry. But before that it was "ABBOT" (I had a lot of ale-powered technology) and the description was "the heat generating monster", as that was appropriate. It gave me a sense of pleasure when I went to, as Windows put it, "shut down the heat generating monster"!

We don't have lack of imagination at work though, e.g. using the characters from Rainbow. However, naming the hundreds of nodes in the cluster proved too much. Any suggestions?

PS. Verity - I like what you write, but you can go on a bit...

@GrahamT

Brighton University, way back in the mists of time had a server called SnowWhite. There were seven sun boxes connected to it named after the dwarves.

The DCs at the place where I work atm are called Earth Wind and Fire, but prior to that I think there was an attempted to go for an Arthurian naming scheme.

Helicopter just because.

From the days of Legend...

We started off using items from Burger Kings menu at the time...

Whopper, Twister etc etc Easy to remember but dam made you hungry all the time...

Home machines are named afer Gen1 Original Transformers... Primus (firewall), Unicron (router), Cybertron (Test bed server) etc etc

John Ronald Reuel who?

Hard to believe, but I appear to be the first geek to file a complaint against the spelling "Tolkein". It's TOLKIEN, fer chrissakes. Get your biblical references right :)

Some guys I used to work with...

Had a set of machines called:

Lightbulb,

Aubergine,

Bottle,

Hairbrush,

Toycar

And some others. I can't even be sure this list is accurate, but the point is that the manager had them all changed when he found out they were all objects that had been found up someone's arse.

Modern Culture?

One of my redhat servers was named Silent.Bob is that a fair name to add to the list?

TheShire

My private network is indeed based on character names from the Lord of the Rings. Gandalf, Frodo, Sam, Merry, etc.

I've also seen stars (orion, caspar, pollux, etc...), capital cities (HongKong, Amsterdam, Oslo), and frequently the "identify at a glance" setup as above where the server names are built up out of geographical indicators of where to actually find a PC.

Once upon a time...

(Posted anonymously, for the obvious reasons that follow...)

...my dear brother-in-law asked me to do installation of a routing Linux server, Linux mini-laptop (this was before Asus EEE and similar), and a Linux/Windows desktop for his home network.

I asked, "How do you want me to name these?"

He said, "Whatever you like, I don't care."

And thus the outgoing server was named hentai.

The cute mini-laptop was yuri.

The desktop was known as yaoi.

You're now free to google what these names mean, but I advice not to do it at work or anywhere with sensitive souls around you with a potential eye for the screen.

Stephen...

My Blackberry is called Stephen.

I miss the days when IT Depts used to give machines imaginative names... gfaufvalhlbcsi01 is no name to give a server.

It all depends how many you've got

Trust me, afer the first 100 servers it all gets a bit too much and you actually start naming them to a format, for instance

What they do (4 letters)

their address (3 digits plus three letters for the city address)

their country (2 Letters...thank you international naming standards)

a number (2-3 digits to tell them apart from all the other servers doing the same thing at teh same site)

so your IIS Webserver at 233 Marmaduke St Swindon, UK being the 3rd IIS server you've installed is called WEBS233MSSUK03

Rule 6

We've delivered networked systems to customers in various cities round the world and always tried to make the names vaguely relevant, so we'd normally choose things like station or suburb names. So systems for Tokyo would get random subway station names. Makes it a pain when you have to remember how to spell the name when you want to remotely connect to Ikebukuro...

A literary alternative.

I have a simple naming scheme for any LAN I set up. I simply pick a Shakespeare play and name the machines after characters. If I run out, I move on to another - preferably related - Shakespeare play.

My home network is currently sporting names from 'Cymbaline.' Work is a mixture of the various histories (Richard, Henry etc..) and a local design studio, whose network I set up recently as a favour, are using Midsummer Night's Dream. Yes, there is a "Bottom"

Been using the same naming convention for years - well, except for that bodged-up Win Server 2003 that I wound up having to completely rebuild from scratch because the original installers were a bunch of morons. That was and still is called 'bastard.'

An old friend...

...once called up for help. Her PC had issued an error and the memory dump in base64 started with the letters VLAD7J which she then tried to read out over the phone. Thus the PC became known as Vlad the Impaler and all her subsequent PCs were officially named Vlad too.

Sorry. Not that interesting.

Pratchett is a good source

I recommend Terry Pratchett character names for computers.

Greebo, Gaspode, Luggage (for a netbook, of course), Unseen (for a wireless access point), Vimes, Weatherwax, Magrat, Rincewind, Havelock. They seem to have a ring to them, and when you need a new name you have a theme to work with.

I fell foul of Rule 10

I have an old Fujitsu Siemens P4M based laptop that in it's time was fast as a thief (even though it was prone to thermal shutdowns - damned if I'll buy another FSC machine) - so I called it the rather pretenscious name 'Lightning'. Oh, how I laugh when I run Half-Life 2 up on it....

I regret not using something appropriate for my wife's Vista machine. Perhaps 'Plague', 'Pestilence', 'Heartbreaker', 'Bast**d-Mother-F*cker'.........

Some More

A place I worked in had NCR tower servers named Basil, Sybil, Manuel, Polly and The Major.

All the Disaster Recovery servers..

Are named after various things from "The Clangers".. Because when a Clanger is dropped, it's always good to have a spare lurking around to take over.

My favourite names...

Ahhh...memories. Here we have dull naming conventions nowadays - a site abbreviation, an asset tag number and a letter denoting the machine type. Once upon a time though, before the proliferation of PCs (yes - a very long time ago, I know!), we used to have pairs of SCO UNIX (remember SCO? They used to be quite big!) boxes running a live and backup warehouse management system.

They all had pairs of names which went together, such as the dull Alpha and Omega. There were some middlingly good names (Wallace and Gromit, Jekyll and Hyde) but for me the supreme example came from the now long-defunct Dundee site which rejoiced in having their servers called Mince and Tatties.

Tolkien names? Who needs 'em! :-)

PS We currently same our AS/400 machines after ships owned once upon a time by the company. My favourite: "Katanga"....

Oddly, nobody seems to find this funny.

@ A J Stiles

... marijuana the router ...

They always said it was a Gateway drug!

with reference to rule 10

Our company used to name all the machines after cartoon characters. When I first had a company laptop it was named "Gonzales" (you know, after the mouse...)

At first it was an appropriate name. It was the fasted computer we had, even outperforming our antiquated desktop still running windows 3.0

After a while it became not so appropriate.

By the time we scrapped it, the name was downright ironic!

All our computers are now named with soulless letters and numbers, since we were taken over by Americans who thought our naming system was too hard to deal with.

Our home network is based around Norman, Doug and Dinsdale. Brownie points for anyone who can guess what the next computer added will be called...

I was going to complain....

"...a proper, horsey name, like 'Desert Orchid' or 'Sanyo Music Centre'."

...that of all the keyboards that taken a coffee soaking courtesy of El Reg, this was the only time the coffee in question had taken a trip through my sinuses to get there. Then, after sponging the worst of it off, I read the comments and LaeMi's made it happen again.

Quality!

However, all that aside. I once set up a series of servers named after a variety of demonic entities. It made sense as networking was still a bit of a black art* back then. Anyhow, I came unstuck when some born-again new hire refused to login to something reporting itself as "Asmodeus" on principle. Fortunately (or unfortunately if you're a religious twat), I managed to convince the powers that be** that downing the whole lot and reconfiguring, with all the attendant hoo-hah, was going to be a sight more expensive than paying the little sod off when they sacked him.

*One thing a good naming convention should have - a really cheesy gag to justify it.

**The earthly ones. No messy stuff with entrails required at all.

The oddest names you ever found?

Disclaimer: I work in a large organization with an established policy for naming anything connected to the network: (three letter location identifier)-(one letter identifier of device type, es. "S" for server, "P" for printer)(four characters unique identifier); the unique identifier may be anything the local admin is pleased with - I set the first character as the last digit of the purchase year so I can sort equipment by age at a glance (useful for PCs), so a desktop computer purchased in 2008 for location XYZ could be XYZ-D8012.

That said, I guess we all have seen fancy names used. Back when the internet was young, I remember of a website running on three servers named Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu (Google it yourself - I like some anime in small doses, so did the webmaster I guess).

Also, I am pretty sure the Vatican website is still running on servers named Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael - I can't remember which one is the firewall tho :-)

(To be honest, my home computers were inflicted names like Xanadu or Area51...)

Blake's Seven

I'm one of the sad gits that named machines after Blake's 7 characters. My main PC is still called Cally (my favourite character) and the laptop is Orac.

Zen was my Windows 2000 server/WinRoute machine, but bit the dust years back when the CPU cooling fan died.

Tarrant was a media machine hooked up to the hifi and TV, which is now a PowerMac G4 imaginatively called 'PowerMacG4'. I had a Jenna too, can't remember what that did.

Years back I worked on an NCR mini. There was a process, a compiler or something, on there called SLARTIBART, because in one of the status screens it had FAST in the column after the name.

Alan.

@ A J Stiles II

Yep, named a whole bunch of servers after recreational drugs; there's at least one per letter of the alphabet.

You can also sub-relate too, e.g. cocaine's backup server is charlie, marijuana's is weed, etc.

Trousers

There is an RS/6000 somewhere in Bournemouth called Trousers

My conventions...

My system is half way between supermodels and transformers at the momement...

Though there's a HAL and a MARVIN thrown into the mix too...

Street names

Belfast went one better - it has an industrial estate called Heron Estate. So all the streets are called Heron - Heron Rd, Heron Ave, Heron Drive, Heron Place etc

I don't think anyone ever got the right mail

Paris - cos she must have been behind the isea

In Science

The possibilities are endless! we have already had Cambrian species but in a Zoology dept you could have species under study or over in the MolBio lab gene names can also be useful, a small cluster for example could named after the hedgehog family, sonic included. Though that would be problematic in those labs working on C. elegans worms as their powers that be have decreed the names should be alphanumeric according to a detailed scheme, spoilsports!

I do agree with the non Tolkein thing though that is so passé, my university had servers called 'Rivendell' and 'Gandalf' back in the '80s for goodness sake.

BTW all the streetnames around here are named after Lochs, we are in Fyne Rd which is off Torridon Rd. Not obvious to the geographically ignorant I grant but a good scheme for a town planner here in Scotland.

A mixture here

My net-facing server is called Psychoceramic as it was originally a 486 machine, and today is a K6-III/450. My laptops are Callanish and SkaraBrae. My VoIP switch is Washi, my Sun is Hikari. My Linux boxes are Asakura and Sonozaki and the FreeBSD one is Matrix. As for the Windows machine? Damnthing.

I've gone through all your comments..

and there isn't anyone who uses the same set as I do for my home network.

It's called 'Dulux', and unsurprisingly all the machines are Green, Blue, Red etc. That worked well for a while, but when I got over 40 systems connected (SETI farm in the attic), I started to run out of simple words.

So now my new systems are Gamboge, Teal, Advocado, Beige, Whitewithahintof....

Rule 1 is universal, actually

Used to go out with a girl who called her guitar Faramir.

We were not long for coupledom.