Don't call me Ishmael

What's in a name?

I remember that quite a few years ago, I noticed a 'fashion' for calling servers by names of 'related things'. So you'd have groups such as iron, copper, steel..... or diamond, sapphire, emerald...

This has the advantage that the people who look after them are less likely to get attached to them (as techies do) and so will make level headed decisions about scrapping them when the time comes; instead of lovingly tending and nursing them against all common sense.

Ronald?

I have to confess I found your WikiAnswers link insufficiently convincing, so I undertook extensive research, and established that Lord Cardigan's horse was indeed called Ronald. Wikipedia said so, so it must be true.

How about extinct arthropods?

Most of the things on my home network are named after Burgess Shale organisms: marrella and wixwia are my PAL and Japanese Wiis and yohoia is my printer. I've extended it further to my red ipod which is sanctacaris and my mobile phone is known to my computer as opabinia when it needs to download some photos for it. No danger of running out of names for quite some time!

Spot on

Thanks Verity. I'm pissed off working with Nw15agr1 too

Wise Words

I was once asked to review a software application in wide use in an organisation. I was sent on a trip to the back of beyond to discuss it with the author/supplier of said application.

I was more than slightly discombobulated to find out that the 'name' of the programme was actually the name of '3GL' it was written in. The swine hadn't *even* named it. Needless to say he was a hippy/self-taught maestro. The application itself was famously pants and known to be so before I was sent off on the quest.

I did the 'due diligence' properly as befits a professional, but you don't need a social worker to know that a child named Bastard should be taken into care forthwith.

Oooooooooh kay ...

And the point?

::wanders off muttering::

My LAN

I already latched onto the need for a theme from day one. All the machines on my home LAN are named after recreational drugs (marijuana the router, heroin the laptop, cocaine the desktop, crystalmeth the dual-xeon media transcoding box, and so on). And when I run out of drugs, I'm going to start using explosives.

Server/PC names

I always call my servers God2, God3, etc on the basis that they are omniprescent. Server-connected printers become God2s pencil, God2s crayon, etc and the router becomes God2s earpiece.

In a similar vein my personal PCs are always called Braincell2, Braincell3, etc on the basis that I've only got 1 left inside my own head!

Woof !

Xxx

domain names ... how about proteins?

Yes indeed, the Managing Director/Senior Partner/Supreme Dalek/whatever he's called himself this week could decide that all machine names shall be the names of proteins, not less than 40 characters long and quite improbably difficult to spell.

Mind you, if the office LAN-botherer spells 'logfile' with two G's, even 'keratin' might prove problematic.

Rule 6 - names from a domain

If you've got a largish network, there's always the NATO designations for Soviet aircraft types.

You know,

* fighters started with "F" - Flanker,Flogger, Foxbat

* helicopters started with "H" - Hind, Helix, Hokum

* bombers started with "B" - Bear, Blinder, Backfire

http://aeroweb.lucia.it/rap/RAFAQ/NatoCodenames.html

Yeah, sad, I know :-)

You know you've run out of creativity when...

...you say bollocks to it and just run through the phonetic alphabet. I'm using Bravo.

Denied

In a previous job I proposed a naming scheme based on serial killers, on the grounds that they were memorable and there are plenty of them.

For some bizarre reason this excellent suggestion was overruled.

At university...

The computer unit had a Gould mini-computer which was problematic at first. Whenever they brought it up, it went down. After a few repetitions, they called it Zebedee. The next one was slow, so that was Brian. Then came Dougal and Florence. The computer science department called theirs "csgould". No imagination!

When they were replaced with Sun boxen, the servers were given the names of mainline stations in London and the workstations named after the stations along the lines from those stations. I suspect the computer unit staff were train spotters...

I have:

Windows: Kiki (laptop), Zaza (PDA), Hector (Media PC).

Linux: Midge (netbook), Mungo (PC). When I set up a mail server, it'll probably be Pat. (Not Mary, I know too many Marys, who'd probably be annoyed with me!)

Talk about sad

At work, we use Greek letters for servers.

For PCs, they used to use the names of characters from the Simpsons, but I thought that was silly - so we started using elements (really pissed off the users that got Ununhexium & Praesodynium). Ran out of elements, so we now use countries, and am just waiting to find out which idiot, sorry poor fool gets "Democratic People's Republic of Congo" or "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia".

My home network is really nerdy - I use the names of dragons from the Anne McCaffrey novels about Pern. It's quite useful for testing purposes as I can set-up the Active Directory using the names of the Holds, Halls & Weyrs for Organisational Units, and the main characters as users, with their role in the society as their Security group.

Yes, I REALLY need to get a life - and I'll start looking as soon as I've finished my cup of klah.

This is true

At Pfizer in Sandwich, there were two printers in the limited access vivisection labs. They were called Bambi and Thumper.

I suppose that this dark sense of humour was only to be expected.

Ours..

Where i used to work we had seven ibm's for the data warehouse, so naturally, they were named after the members of S Club 7 - how we laughed across the office when I announced that Rachel had gone down on me again.

Nowadays its much more conservative planets, saturn, earth mercury etc.

Once had to name a Netware server "DOWN"

It was for the office in County Down and that was their naming convention. I told them it would just look bad and confuse the ops team but their attitude was that a policy was a policy so get on with it.

Personally I say name your computers and servers whatever you want to because it will make absolutely no difference.

If you are naming your home computers then the only reason for "clever" names is to try to impress people. Which it certainly won't.

At work your users will refer to their PC as "my PC" and not give a damn about the actual name and as for file servers they don't access stuff from "Gandalf" or "Spock" or "Filesrv01" or whatever they access shit from the "S" drive anyway.

Mine are

freya - server

odin - my primary desktop

thor - my netbook - used to be my old desktop

heimdall - firewall/router - look it up to understand what it's meant to be doing

frigg - my mom's machine - fairly obvious once you read the meaning

baldr - my cell phone

loki - my UPS

Still need to name my myth box... atm it's just myth

Whats in a name!

I named my Computer, Skynet

Its not that powerful though as I only use it for Programming not gaming.

Im currently working on an Advanced Recognition & Navigation Interface Engine, (A.R.N.I.E)

M Dyson

Rule 11

Don't give servers names descriptive of their function.

For instance FinanceFilesOne, BackUpBox, SensitiveFiles, EmployeeRecs.

Security through obscurity although not a solution in itself does resist cluing up any potential hackers.

Could it be that this is such an obvious rule it was omitted?

I personally use characters from the tales of king Arthur on my home network.... Albion, Avalon, Uther, Gwain, Mordred etc. The exception is my missus' PC and laptop which are named Angus and LittleAngus respectively after the cat. The planets imho, are also a good source of computer names.

I want my click back

And here I was thinking that Ishmael was the codename for a new processor.

Instead, I stumbled onto someones blog?!?

@Admiral Grace Hopper

What, even "Vroomfondel" and "Majikthise"?

Heavenly bodies and birds at uni

At UKC in the late 80s/early 90s, the VAX cluster sported planetary names (Jupiter, Saturn, Titan etc.) and the Unix boxen were birds (raven, hawk, eagle etc.). Dunno if the tradition carried on after the machines themselves died, though.

Just to back up the Blake's 7 meme, I always call my laptop Orac (well, it was supposed to be portable...)