What are your systems' names?

Heh, good topic. Sometimes it takes me more time to figure out a good name than installation alone ;-)
At work, naming is very conventional and strict: two letters for a location (usually the town, not a country), three letters for a usage and a number made out of a DC location, year installed followed by an instance #.

In my LAB I've vanilla cause it was the first Itanium I bought. Then some other ones which were named by the cartoon characters (Looney tunes, Shrek and some SK/CZ ones).

I name sun servers with the sun in their name. One OpenIndiana is named adam (abbreviation for advanced disk array management ;-)).

Non-personal virtual machines usually carry abbreviated OS type (sun, w2k3, lx, fbsd, obsd) with a preffix of a virtual technology. In my setup vb for VirtualBox and vm for VMware. So I have vblx01, vmsun01, ..

I've a FreeBSD in virtual machine I like a lot (I do use Windows7 as a desktop) called foxi - sexi FreeBSD :)

And my very main personal FreeBSD server in datacenter is called /translated to English and added space here/ three squirrels.
 
I'm a fan of Capcom's Mega Man. Consequently, I use the names of characters or robotmasters from those games:

Server 1: dr.light
Server 2: dr.wily
Laptop 1: protoman
Laptop 2: megaman
Computer for backup: shadowman
 
Cool topic :)

Until I've read this thread, I never thought of devising such a naming "template", and my current desktop's name quite sucks -- sless. I don't even know why I put it there.

My previous names were blacklight (laptop) and graylight (desktop).

However, now that you've inspired me, I'll probably change my desktop's name to something related to Lovecraft's work.
 
Greek mythology here (192.168.10.x subnet)

achill - .1
agamemnon - .2
aphrodite - .3
apollon - .4
ares - .5
artemis - .6
asklepios - .7
athene - .8
atlas - .9
deimos - .10
demeter - .11

And a tagged LAN / WiFi for guests - there names of Egyptian gods

and finally 3 rootie's

zeus
uranos
themis
 
Was using SoulCalibur:
mitsurugi, sophitia, zasalamel, taki, talim, cassandra, astaroth, raphael, yoshimitsu, cervantes

Kinda recently, started shifting to Avatar: The Last Airbender:
roku, katara, suki, zuko, kiyoshi


So my house currently has a mixture of the two themes.
 
I always have had one PC on my house, its name is always "Hal-9000", I just name my work PC the same.

And just to made some good laughs: this post about naming conventions on slashdot
 
Cool stuff. Yeah, the naming part is often the hardest, especially if you can be sure that the name will also be something which certain customers might get to see at certain occasions.

Or what to think about my current dilemma: when you're moving your virtual server park away from one environment to the other, in my case also switching operating systems (from Linux CentOS 6.x to FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE), which brings the puzzle of "To rename, or not to rename..".

Alas, my current Internet servers: "smtp, caspar, melchior, balthasar, ikari, zefiris, ibuki".
2 in-house (Windows) servers: "magi & macron".

And so the problem is what and how to name the new server park which I'm building.

Oh; bonus points for the one who can spot the overall theme which is applied to my naming scheme :)
 
Funnily enough, I am just in the process of building two boxes and one will be called "BEAST" - It will be used at home as a CAD workstation. Beast will be running Windows, unfortunately, but the other box will be running FreeBSD and will be called "HEFFALUMP" which is the same name as its predecessor and the predecessor before that.

At home, my computers are mostly named after children's characters from Winnie the Pooh. So we also have:

POOH - My laptop
PIGLET - My wife's laptop
EEYORE_1 - My 9 year old daughter's Asus EEEPC
EEYORE_2 - My 7 year old daughter's Asus EEEPC
TIGGER - An Apple workstation mostly used for making music

At work I used to support a large number of customers and for a long time we were given relatively free rein to name machines whatever we chose. That is until a customer complained that we had named their workstations:

DOPEY
GRUMPY
SNEEZY
DOC
BASHFUL
SLEEPY
HAPPY
SNOW_WHITE

I think it was the user who logged into DOPEY who complained. Nowadays, there is a rule that devices have to have a boring (and hard to remember) string like "CAD1603"

We once had a problem when the IP address was changed on SNOW_WHITE in the host files of some other machines but not others. We got bizarre helpdesk calls from users. You can guess the sort of thing and that it was quite tricky to diagnose at first. The fix became known as the "Snow White Solution".

Even now, similar problems are referred to as "Snow White Problems". Despite that fact that all machines have "sensible" names for at least 6 years.

Also my printers at home have always been named after poets (mono printers) and artists (colour printers). Currenty we have:

WORDSWORTH - An ancient HP4+
PICASSO - A colour inkjet
 
Nice thread!
I had a colleague that named the machines after their importance, like mainserver, firewall, backup and so on...it was a way to easy the way for hackers to concentrate on the right machine to own!

I've never worked in an environment with more machines than the dwoarf, and quite frnakly I hate those environments where machines are numbered, like ux001, ux002 and so on.
 
Mine are all named after angels and demons from Diablo. So far I have:

Diablo > file server
Inarius > workstation
Itherael > old thinkpad/test machine

And on the weekend I'll be adding Tyrael.

I see I'm not the only one that has used this naming theme :)
 
fluca1978 said:
quite frnakly [sic] I hate those environments where machines are numbered, like ux001, ux002 and so on.
Click to expand...
I can imagine one does this for rooms that contain several machines, e.g. a student computer lab. If there is any sort of logic behind the nomenclature it tells you where the machine is, which can be helpful for troubleshooting by helpdesks or system administration. But otherwise, I agree ;)
 
fonz said:
I can imagine one does this for rooms that contain several machines, e.g. a student computer lab. If there is any sort of logic behind the nomenclature it tells you where the machine is, which can be helpful for troubleshooting by helpdesks or system administration. But otherwise, I agree ;)
Click to expand...

Of course for some anonymous labs, like university ones, it is ok. I had a colleague that named the workstations after the telephone name of the desk, and so he did for the usernames of the workstation. Therefore you ended up with an username 489 after the phone number xxx489 and that logged into a workstation named w489. The major problem was that people get moved around offices, so they changed quite often their phone number and you had to reconfigure everything...not really smart! But the reason was that knowing the phone number you can access username and workstation name and even where the computer was. Quite frankly, I found making a diagram of the network and naming machines for their purposes and username after their users much more satisfactory and not hard to maintan.
 
fluca1978 said:
I had a colleague that named the workstations after the telephone name of the desk, and so he did for the usernames of the workstation. Therefore you ended up with an username 489 after the phone number xxx489 and that logged into a workstation named w489.
Click to expand...
Yikes :O
 
I use Greek mythology names. The name of the god, his children and grandchildren recursively. :e Starting from the oldest children. Then lineal descendants according to age - all male and female offspring..

Thanks to this fact, I am able to administer thousand of FreeBSD servers :p
 
Set up a relic with FreeBSD for testing things I don't want to subject my working system to, without understanding them first, ie ZFS.

Named it Sturgis-850C, after a missile silo in Sturgis, South Dakoka. The same place I embarked on an epic motorcycle quest to in Road to Sturgis. :p
 
After I started to be responsible for more than 50 servers and 800 client computers in a group company I started to follow naming convention which consists of 10 letters and 3 digits, for example:

RSBGKOMSRV046

Where:
  • First 2 letters represent the country (RS - Serbia)
  • Next 2 letters represent the city or place (BG - Belgrade)
  • Next 3 letters represent abbreviated company name
  • Last 3 letters represent abbreviated OS type and machine type (SRV or NIX for servers and DTP or NTB for Windows workstations, HYP for hypervisors etc.)
  • Finally, 3 digits are given incrementally

This way I can easily get a lot of information just from LDAP queries about names, e.g.:
  • How many windows notebooks are there in Belgrade?
  • How many computers in total has company X?

Of course, those machines are given as much DNS aliases as we need, like "proxy" or "mx4" or "terminal7" etc., so people do not need to remember cryptic names.

Now, as for my own servers and workstations, I use names from books, movies and games so at the moment I have:
  • kaa - named after the python from The Jungle Book (I mean book, not cartoon)
  • tazar - my server named after one of greatest beastmasters from Heroes of Might and Magic III
  • mephala - my desktop named after one of greatest rangers in Heroes of Might and Magic III
 
My desktop is as-laptop (Freebsd FreeBSD 9.1), laptop is blackfox (Mac OS X), fileserver is night (OpenIndiana), and my work server is alpha (MicroVAX running OpenVMS 7.3).
 
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