Here are computer naming schemes that we've seen in real life, or maybe that we think would be good ideas. Most are people, places or things, but there are others. See also TipsForNamingComputers.
People (and People-like Beings)
- Anime Characters - Home computers are named after girls (Motoko, Ruriko, Teletha, Naru, Mizuho), Work computers are named after guys (Sousuke, Keitaro, Duo, Tenchi, Tsutomu)
- Asterix characters -- We called the server Toutatis (the village god), Cacofonix (the village musician - in our case an old print server that was very noisy), Obelix, Asterix, Dogmatix,...
- At my old school, they bought 8 new computers. The server was snowwhite and the rest were sneezy, grumpy, sleepy, dopey etc... :o)
- Snow White was serving seven dwarves? all at once? Oh my. What school was this?
- At the University of Georgia, I ran a network whose subdomain was 'franklin'. Of course, the machines got named 'ben', 'aretha', and so forth. 'Ben' was replaced with amuch larger Sun box, which we named 'bigben'. Har.
- Bond Girls - Christmas Jones, Holly Go Lightly, Pussy Galore (the public was both more and less dirty minded back then!) etc
- Books Characters - Voldemort, Dumbledore, ...
- Buffy/Angel characters: Angel, Xander, Buffy, Dawn, Glory, Willow, Giles, Wesley etc. etc. Also known as the scooby gang.
- Cartoon Characters
- Animaniacs: Pinky, Brain, Buttons, Mindy...
- Futurama: Zoidberg, Fry, Leela, Bender, Calculum, ...
- Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies (40s-60s Warner Bros. cartoons): bugs, daffy, porky, elmerfudd, marvin, sylvester, tweety...
- The Simpsons: Our nameservers are named otto, apu, moe, ned. My iBook is called krabappel.
- Characters from movies given the MysteryScienceTheater treatment -- megaweapon, lemmankinan, kalgan, winky...
- Common/classic dog names (Fido, Rover, Spot...)
- Companions of DoctorWho -- polly, jogrant, nyssa, tegan, leela, sarahjane, ace, zoe, mel ... "romanadvoratrelundar" would be a fun one to have to log into manually every day. And hopefully without spoiling any plot let it be said that it would be a particularly bad omen to name a machine "adric".
- You might hit a snag with "amy" though -- it would almost certainly have to be paired with a "rory".
- Dead astronauts (seen at NASA's JetPropulsionLaboratory)
- Dictators: attila (Wow! --AttilaSzegedi), maggie, genghis, vlad, caligula, george ...
- Epic fantasies - Network is Amber, hosts are Dworkin, Corwin, Fiona, Random, Merlin, Ghostwheel (laptop), etc.
- Famous couples (often seen when machines are purchased in pairs, when operated as a two-node cluster, or when one serves as the backup for the other)
- george & gracie (from GeorgeBurns? & GracieAllen?) - My school's computer lab had a pair of AT&T 3B2s, with these names.
- beavis & butthead
- fred & ginger
- calvin & hobbes
- castor & pollux (the twins of Gemini; used at Georgia Tech in the mid 80's)
- tick & tock (US Naval Observatory timeservers)
- itchy & scratchy (and the bizarrely named ItchyScratchyStorage? rack between them.)
- indyjones (an SGI Indigo2 workstation) & lostark (a Sun Enterprise 450 server -- similar in size to the Ark from the movie)
- iceberg and titanic
- jake and elwood
- wallace and gromit
- Groups of people. At SUNY--Stony Brook, the math department bought 3 Sun workstations in 1987, and we were trying to decide on a naming scheme. I suggested mathematicians, another suggested women (as they're so fickle), and the third agreed and nominated fawn, jessica, and donna. Sorry about the un-PC behavior. We later added vanna and vanessa. Fawn was the file-server, of course. The Apple LaserShredder was attached to her.
- Hitchhikers Guide Characters - Marvin for the fickle laptop, arthur for the boring server, and Zaphod for the dual processor.
- Horror-movie actors: karloff, lugosi, chaney, schreck, cushing
- LordOfTheRings : Gandalf, Sauron, Bilbo ...
- A local ISP here in PortlandOregon is called Aracnet; their logo is a smiling spider. Their shell server, for those who prefer a terminal session to PPP, is(was) called--what else--Shelob.
- Moomin characters -- trochees: moomin, mymble, snufkin, nibling, ninny, grumble, muddler, joxter, muskrat, fuzzy, hodgkins, whomper, gaffsie; monosyllables: snork, sniff, bob; others: littlemy, misabel, salome, sorryoo, thingumy, tootricky, fillyjonk.
- Monsters - Our servers were all named after Godzilla monsters; Mortha, Gamera, Batra, Anzilla, Gargantua, about a dozen machines in total... until some new IT manager decided to use the very clever naming scheme of mlbint01-mlbint12.
- Movie characters - lonestar, hathaway, roberts
- Muppets : bert, ernie, kermit, bigbird, grover, oscar, elmo
- Muppets : on a home network - work machine is kermit, play machine is misspiggy, laptop is scooter
- Pokémon. Gengar, Pikachu, Elekid, Marill, ... At 649^H^H^H^H 721 [and this number is only going to keep growing!], there are enough of these for a medium to large sized network. (I have only the first three).
- Porn Stars - The first two on the network were ginger and amber
- Protagonists of Ancient Video Games -- "qbert", "pacman", "mario", ... Adapt the selection as appropriate to the time period you prefer. See also other video-game and game related names.
- Minor Video Game Characters/Sidekicks -- yoshi, dalbozz, lola, etc. We once had a firewall named six-armed-purple-beast-alarm-system (from Zork Grand Inquisitor). It was fun asking the ISP to change the reverse lookup on that one!
- Religious Figures (real or fictional) -- Jesus (my home computer), Nyarlethotep, Jehovah, Shiva, Ganesh, etc. It's not a bad idea to break out figures by type. EG: Egyptian gods for email, Greek for HTTP servers, etc
- Norse Gods: Thor, Loki, Odin... Most of them are nice and short.
- Ancient Greek Gods. Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite, Artemis, Athena, etc.
- Egyptian Gods: Ra, Osiris, Isis....
- Indian: Shiva, Vayu (the fiancee decided to name the wireless routerafter the god of winds ;) )
- Aztec Gods: Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc, etc. Most of them are long, evil, and have unpronouncable collections of consonants strung together. Good choice if you think the DNS system is overrated.
- At Project Rastko, computers are named after Slavic gods: Perun (boss's computer), Vid (scanner, OCR), Vesna (secretary's computer), Veles, etc.
- Biblical characters: a DNS server named dorcas, the character from the New Testament who wove clothes for the poor and apparently unclothed
- Star Trek -- 1of10, 2of10, 3of10, halfadozenofone,... (Recommended for NT, W2000 machines. The greatest thing about this naming pattern is how every non-trekkie will need it explained and will then call it really stupid.) One of my disks is called Tiberius (That's the T in James T Kirk :P) [and two others Jean-Luc and LaForge?, but those names aren't as obscure :P]
- Teams of people. Another place I worked had 3 servers named mo, curly, and larry. I tried very hard to get the system administrators to fix the obvious typo; I explained that mo being misnamed was the cause of all our network difficulties. Every attempt was rejected. --EricJablow
- Shakespearean characters. See http://bookshelved.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TheTempest for an example
- Thomas the Tank Engine engines -- has the advantage that each name has an associated number to use as the last part of the IP address. Current boxes are henry (192.168.0.3), gordon (192.168.0.4) and donald (192.168.0.9).
- WilliamGibson characters? - Case, Molly, Armitage, Wilson, Finn, Angie, Mona, 3Jane, Flatline, etc.?
- Arrakis spanish isp consistente naming: Dune, Scytale (IRC bot), Coriolis, Fedaykin, fremen, bene teilax, melange, caladan, etc..
- People who were admins on a mud. This was back in 1993, although the computer named after my mudchar was still around for several years after.
- Acronym. Many years ago I put together a (sort of) copy of an automated modem test station. I called it MATT, for Modem Automated Test Table. The <cough> authorities didn't like that name, so I ended up calling it Fred.
- The Marx brothers. Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, Gummo, and Groucho.
- Famous soccer players: Chengue, Sosita, Lembo, etc...
- Ripley, Connor, Calvin, Janeway, Arroway...
Places
- Astronomical Objects -- If you compile this on Jupiter, it won't run in Orion (what does this say about Einstein's 1st postulate, the laws of nature are the same in all inertial reference frames). We had star names beginning with C. The file server was CygnusX - which is a black hole. Also, stars: Aldeberan, Betelgeuse, Capella, Deneb, Enif, Fomulhaut, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arabic_star_names for tons and tons more.
- Bodies of Water -- Cornell University uses this in one of its CS labs, situated as it is among New York's Finger Lakes (Cayuga, Seneca, Keuka, Canandaiuga, Owasco)...
- There's always Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg - if you hate your users.
- Countries (host address would contain the international dialling code. "Hello, is that support? I can't get into France!")
- Hometowns -- WorldStreet used this scheme and had few if any conflicts.
- Island Groups (logical and physical) -- UniversityOfWashington has tahiti, sumatra, fiji, and ceylon
- Mountains -- everest, rainier, hood, etc.
- National Parks -- The [[http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/][VirtualRealityApplicationsCenter?]] ([[http://www.iastate.edu][IowaStateUniversity?]], formerly ICEMT) has/had banff, moab, denali, etc.
- Place Names, Real or Fictional -- "Tibet", "Panama" (a router?), "Trantor".
- Planets and Moons -- One of our labs had 2 servers, Saturn and Jupiter. Each workstation was named after a moon of either Saturn or Jupiter. (This meant that everybody logged into europa and io, because they were the easiest to spell.)
- In the Physics & Astronomy department at my university where I work, we use moons for the names of our servers. Io, Puck, Titan, etc. The best one however is our backup server, named Null.
- Shipping forecast zones. E.g. viking, dogger, fisher, shannon, fastnet etc.
- "tatara-ba" -- My current desktop machine; it's a place-name from a movie, and also has a literal translation.
- "tacoma-narrows" -- Gateway machine at the college I used to go to. Named after the ill-fated bridge.
- "Wistah" was the name of a server on the corporate network at Banyan Systems in Westborough, Massachusetts. I think I had been working there for about three years before it dawned on me one day that this was the native pronounciation of "Worcester", a large city just a little west of Westborough. Indeed, it was confirmed when I asked, the server was named after the city.
- "kickin" and "chicken" after the Kickin' Chicken chain, a popular lunch place at work.
Things
- Area of Specialization -- At the HP graphics lab there were names like "transform", "matrix", "raster", "jaggy", "spline", etc.
- Beer -- carlsberg, stella, landlord, guinness, murphys, etc.
- Board games (see also video games): monopoly, candyland, chutes and ladders, scrabble, operation, boggle (and not to insult them by comparison with trivial games, but surely chess and checkers, too)
- Card games (see also board and video games): poker, solitaire (canfield, russian bank...see Hoyles)...
- Car Brands -- An easy one if you don't want to have think too hard.
- Cereal -- When MIT first started using workstations heavily, whatever group RMS was in (ummm...project MAC?) used frosted-flakes, cheerios, raisin-bran, etc.
- Cereal and other breakfast foods entry 2: cereal, waffle, pancake, eggs, bacon, sausage
- Cereal (sort of) entry 3: Breakfast Cereals -- entirely by accident, I seem to have begun this theme with the name ``slicedbread (as in ``the greatest thing since sliced bread). I later named a computer ``specialk (was watching a Law & Order episode mentioning Ketamine, a drug which goes by the street name--or so they said--of ``specialk), and so forth...
- Cheeses -- used in a university in Wisconsin. Also used at Warwick Uni, for the Maths department sun workstations
- Classic video games -- asteroids, pong, breakout, space invaders, frogger, galaga, pacman, ms.pacman, centipede, millipede, battlezone, tetris, etc.
- Colours -- which inevitably lead back to Star Wars. Red One, Red Two... Red Five... At the University of Utah Computer Graphics lab there were three Apollo workstations in a row called red, green, and blue.
- Colors entry 2: there are a zillion color names available for naming (e.g. with X11, see rgb.txt for many color names). SeaFoamGreen?, Magenta...
- Drug Slang -- An unnamed startup uses this convention. The goal was to use names with double-entendre, such as "jones", "jah", "scale". A particularly well-chosen name was the router, named "cigs" (gateway drug, gateway machine).
- Elements -- According to one source, MIT's lab machines normally are named simply with a pair of numbers, giving lab and machine within lab. However, for a prank, they were once renamed to the form "Hydrogen-1", "Helium-1", etc, with the lab number being the quantity. (See MitHacks.) Likewise, I used to work at a place where the machines were named after the noble gasses. We never did this, but we thought it would be a lot of fun if their IP numbers matched their atomic numbers. -- RobertChurch (Reality is that they named the machines after all the elements. So there was hydrogen, helium in the same lab and I believe it was only the W20-575 cluster. Later the names were reset :(. -- IraCooper ) I've seen this done before, with their atomic number being their IP address, and using the name of the first isotype for single processor machines, and the second isotope for the dual processor machines etc, so "deuterium", "helium" etc... -- PerryLorier)
- Famous Disasters - Hindenberg, Titanic, ...
- Fictional Computers -- ziggy, deepthought, hal, shodan, gibson, etc.
- Gems and Minerals -- "Amethyst", "Ruby", "Pyrite". Another good one for the lazy.
- Mexican dishes -- taco, enchilada, burrito, tequila
- "MinimumWage" -- A long-retired 386 Linux box with 4MB of RAM. Named so because all the other machines on the LAN were state-of-the-art 486s, and the 386 came at a bargain-basement price.
- Mountain bikes (brands of) were used in one department I worked in where all the group were keen sports addicts. kona, marin, etc
- Named after trash for windows machines: landfill, dumptruck, etc
- Peaceful: eden, tranquility, etc
- Scotch distilleries/alcohol: I have two laptops, knockando and ardbeg, a workstation named lagavulin, servers named oban, cardhu, and springbank. My wife's laptop (she likes bourbon) is jimbeam, and our router/gateway: ethanol. Prior servers: dalwhinnie, cragganmore, glendronach and a really old box named dewars.
- Space probes: Spirit, Opportunity, Huygens, Galileo, Sojourner, Cassini, Chandra, Hubble...
- Species of animals or birds - I name all my machines after species of ducks :- campbell, shoveller, teal, muscovy, wigeon, aylesbury, eider and so on.
- Star Wars -- "xwing", "r2d2", and many others.
- Tequila -- If you're not a drinker, you might be surprised at how many words surround a specific drink: "mezcal", "agave", "gold", "silver"... What I like about this one is that a person might, over the course of a few weeks with the machines, learn a few names without seeing the pattern - and then suddenly it would dawn on him. --DanielKnapp
- The seven heavenly virtues: faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence. The first three were used at a previous employer; until I happened across this list at SevenDeadlySins, I wasn't aware we had four more to go. (I'd prefer Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy.)
- Negative emotions: anger, hate, despair, lazy, erratic, miserable...
- Trains - SiverStar?, Crescent, Pioneer, MudHen?, Broadway and so on. We're in the train software business, so I guess this makes sense.
- Trees - so oak, walnut, redwood, elm, avocado (for the Sun pizza box)
- Very silly names - such as the lab of SGI Indys named "gestion", "ffrence", etcetera.
- I recall a medical school in Australia that names all its machines after sexually transmitted diseases ("In case anyone asks where you can get syphilis on-line.") My brother named the machines in his lab after infectious diseases, until the network administrator went to his boss.
- Once had a naming scheme that started with the SevenDeadlySins and progressed into naming personal workstations after the perceived personality defects of the users... I can see it now: greed and gluttony always seem to need more RAM, sloth takes forever to boot up, anger spits up a lot of error messages...
- Edgar Allan Poe stories: pit is an underpowered router/firewall/gateway, pendulum is a beefy workstation, raven is the new workstation and print server, reddeath is a networked printer, and sphinx is a travelling laptop (it looks bigger than it really is...)
- Dwellings -- trochees: igloo, teepee, wigwam, treehouse, villa, mansion, condo, tavern, penthouse, cottage, sandbox; monosyllables: inn, lodge, hut, flat, shack, cave, hole, trench; others: bungalow, caravan, hotel, motel. (I like these because they are somewhat intuitive -- that is, if you think of the users [or, in the case of igloo, why not the Linux mascot?] as living inside the computer. Anyway, we have an exotic dwelling theme going on over here. -- DanielBrockman)
- Candy names -- "mike" and "ike", kitkat, snickers, M&Ms, jujubees, etc
- Mammals indigenous to the State of Wyoming, bison, pronghorn, wapiti, ... It was a small network.
- Body parts. Used at Warwick Uni, examples include Spleen and Liver. About 20 in all, all workstations in the same lab, which instantly became known as The Meat Locker
- Herbs, also at Warwick Uni, again in a single lab. Saffron, Anise, Tansy, etc. That room became The Herb Garden.
- The atomic bombs LittleBoy? and FatMan? and their delivery planes EnolaGay? and Bockscar
Other
- Adjacent words, grouped in pairs, from popular songs. For example, the American National Anthem gives: ohsay, canyou, seeby, thedawns, earlylight, whatso, etc. "Losing My Religion" gives: ohlife, isbigger, biggerthan, youand, youare, notme, etc. Brilliant!
- All contain a certain letter -- I like "z", yielding "ziggenfous", "lazyfish", "zwip" (laptop), many others.
- Alphabets -- I've seen alphabets used very often, and there are a number available: Greek, Hebrew, Norse, Phonetic (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, etc.).
- At Swansea uni, all the Comp Sci machines have to have names starting with "cs". The campus is practically on the sea front so I got "cside". Other suggestions have included cshell, cserpent and cslewis. All the student's union machines have to start with "su". Sadly no one has dared to create "support", "suspense", "suspicion", "surprise" and so on... They do (or did, anyway) have a box called "supercomputer", though . We did indeed, it was a mistake, everyone around the world kept trying to break into it. I like support although sadly the naming restriction has gone away so its too late. We did manage to get sunofbeach for a while
- At Aberystwyth when the first Sun workstations for students arrived they were to be called teacha teachb teachc etc... thinking this was bad someone said "Why don't we name them after fish". To which the reply was "fisha, fishb, fishc,..." - never let mathematicians name computers.
- BabelFishery? -- each lab gets a word, the machines within it are translation of that word -- good, bien, bueno, hao...
- Cartoon/TV dogs -- underdog, peabody, lassie, rintintin, snowy (TinTin?'s dog), balto (Iditarod fame)
- Create the host name in such a way that it gets a meaning together with the DomainName: cryp.to, yes.no, or another cunning name from MIT: vo.mit.edu. Also, the Illinois Institute of Technology (iit.edu) using the hostnames "bullsh", "cowsh", and so forth; or the group liquor.cabi.net, clothes.cabi.net, gun.cabi.net, etc.
- "Deep Blue" -- The IBM computer that beat chess master Garry Kasparov. Descendant of IBM's "Deep Thought", which was named after the computer in the HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy, and which previously lost to Kasparov. The "Blue" comes from IBM's logo color, and was a take off on another winner, Deep Thought, which was a take off on ...
- Flaming Faggotry: Lusciousland and Sassyville are our little ones right now. (for very strange reasons)
- Fictional computers. ghostwheel, onosendai, wintermute, abulafia, ziggy, markforer, hactar, hal, eddie, mycroft, teramind, and of course deepthought. (I want a network where I can name my computers after ships of TheCulture.)
- Weather patterns (storm, rain, snow, mist...) At one lab I worked at, the computers were named in terms of their rank (their computational power) after similar weather patterns. The best machine was "Hurricane", the next best was "Tornado". The poor old Mac SE in the corner was lovingly called "Cumulus.", even though it wasn't really networked. My workplace does this too, for networked printers; tornado, typhoo, twister and tsunami are the big ones. rainbow is the big color plotter, raindrop is the little color printer.
- Words or short phrases ending in 'it' - my machine was 'spirit', the file server was 'shareit', the database server was 'storeit', and the sysadmins, of course, had 'bangit', 'bodgeit' and 'fixit'
- ScannedInAvian?.com has raven, thunderbird (Athlon Thunderbird of course), chicken (486), etc.
- Bond movies: Thunderball, Moonraker...
- "code" and "red" -- Code Red
- bfs: Big Freaking (and other f-words) Server.
- Adjectives ending in Y. wobbly, smelly, weezy, fluffy, sticky etc. This has served us well for years and the adjective rule can bend if required -- spanky, fatty and skinny. Of course, further hilarity can be wrought from drive shares //smelly/pants etc.
- Innocently named sexual positions (wheelbarrow, victory, etc). This naming scheme is in place in a high school for added value
- No two names from the same namespace: one from film quotes, one from famous computers, one from "people whose name appears on Norwegian milk cartons", one from Mexican slang words, one from extinct chocolate brands, one from conservative ex-politicians (actually, only my bikes get names from there).
- Can you give examples? I have no idea who appears on Norwegian milk cartons; FranklyMyDearIdontGiveAdamn? and MyGodItsFullOfStars seems unwieldy; the only Mexican slang that's coming to mind is (ahem) unsuitable for a business environment; I can't think of any extinct chocolate brands...
- Film quotes: in the neo-slapstick movie "Tuvalu" where all dialogue happens in one-word-sentences, someone notices the brand of a steam machine is Imperial. Norwegian milk persons: Preben Something presented a trivial coffee recipe. Extinct chocolate brands: Galak is our best friend. May still be available in other places. Chilango appears to mean "someone from the capital". And so on.
Projects
- SGI had a server named Ultra that was installed for the UltraSixtyFour? project (latter marketed as the NintendoSixtyFour?). Ultra stayed around SGI for years as a host for employee home pages.
- Trochees all ending with "xy". It started with doxy by someone who wasn't aware it was an English word, and was followed by roxy, moxy, foxy, and poxy.
Jokes
- Back when Sun workstations typically had 8 meg of RAM, I was at a startup doing a very difficult cutting-edge project that required vast amounts of RAM (128 meg, the most you could put on a Sun back then). So I thought it only natural to name the system after "the biggest thing ever built around a Sun: Ringworld"
- Ages ago I named a DataGeneral supermini Cuthbert J. Twillie, WcFields' character in My Little Chickadee. None of us noticed that when timeshare users from around the city used a piece of commercial software on the machine, the program listed that name (truncated to 16 chars) as the contact person for support. One day the vice president came storming at me after she answered a call from someone asking for Mr. Twil. So I surreptitiously renamed the machine Egbert Souse ("accent grave over the e"), Fields' character in The Bank Dick, and waited for someone to call up mispronouncing Souse.
- I don't get it. Is "twil" a cussword in some country's slang? No, it's just not the name of anyone at the company. And so, if the name I give to the machine is going to show up as the "support" person, I had better enter the name of someone at the company. Considering 99% of our customers were known to us by name and knew our names, we were amazed to receive a call out of nowhere from someone asking for this nonexistent Mr. Twil--around 2 years after I called the machine Twillie. Being incorrigible, I entered another fictitious name (Egbert Souse), one which wouldn't get truncated but would, when mispronounced by someone who doesn't know Fields movies, sound like a reference to heavy alcohol consumption. Then we engineers at the company got our heads together and decided that a call for Cuthbert Twillie (no truncation problem) would signal a call from a clueless person who will probably need a lot of hand holding. Egbert lasted about a week, and we were back to Cuthbert.
- While working at a small non-profit organization, I was entrusted to set up a small, public-access network for sharing a DSL line over some 30 PCs, of which only about ten would be in use most of the time. These machines were divided into three groups of ten - one for a class group which met daily, one for general use among the clients, and one for another specific group whose purpose wasn't very well defined. The first group I named for composers - Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, etc., - the second for inventors - Edison, Franklin, Tesla, etc. When I came to that third group, which were rarely used because of their uncertain purpose, I decided to have a bit of fun, and see if any one caught the pattern. The names I used were Hill, Haywood, Goldman, Spooner, Tucker, Warren, Thornely, Black, Barrow, and Parker... the last two, of course, were ringers, but folklore holds that regarding their motives, they fit in with the rest.
Names can be use in place of numbers
- Pokémon (#1=Bulbasaur,#2=Ivysaur,#25=Pikachu,etc.)
- Elements (#1=Hydrogen,#2=Helium,#3=Lithium,etc.)
- Chapters in the manual for the computers (?)
- Thomas the Tank Engine (#3=Henry,#4=Gordon,etc.)
- The Tarot Major Arcana: (#0=fool, #1=magician, ... #20=judgement, #21=world)
Stories too long for the above lists:
Do unimaginative naming schemes--like the name of the user, the function of the machine (printQueue4), the serial number or asset tracking number, or some randomly assigned bit of fluff--count?
No, they don't count, and as is very well known by now, it is always a mistake to name a system after its user. Inevitably, eventually users swap computers, so then user Bob is working on system Jim, and user Jim is working on Bob, and everyone is permanently confused.
It's also a bad idea to use something like an asset tracking number, simply because such things are difficult for humans to remember.
But unimaginative things are especially bad to list on this page, simply because they're boring. :-)
I worked at a place that had the AntiPattern of, by default, naming machines after their users. Most of the engineers, when receiving a machine, renamed it right away, but the chief engineer was notorious for keeping the old names, which was really annoying since he usually put himself at the end of the "new hardware food chain"--all the old machines ended up flowing through him. To combat this, one engineer, before giving up his old machine, renamed it "dumpysmurf", thinking that surely no one would let that name stand. As far as I know, it was still named dumpysmurf when the company shut down years later.
I work at a shop where each machine is rebuilt from an image snapshot before it moves from one user to another, in which case naming the machine after the user is not so bad an idea--at least when the machine starts running network-intensive malware, you know who needs to be visited with a cluebat, without tediously looking through various databases (larger companies would just unplug the network jack and identify the user when they complain about not having network access, but we prefer the personal touch ;-). This ritual cleansing has a number of nice side-effects, such as cleaning out all the Microsoft malware from Windows boxes. It gets rid of the third-party viruses, trojans, worms, and spyware too. Of course, now we have the problem of figuring out which of a user's many possible names to use: johns? jsmith? john_smith? john_q_smith? "John Smith"? JohnSmith? jon_boy? the_johnmeister? JohnSmith9? john_smith_second_computer?
We encountered a similar problem when we evaluated some software with a floating license server.We started out with BrandX software, and we named the license server "BrandX" (names changed to remain innocent of trademark infringement ;-). We now run BrandY software, which has a license server...still named "BrandX." Apparently we can change all technical details of our license (including customer legal name, billing address, responsible party, and host ID) with a simple phone call or email, but changing our license server's host name would require a nuclear explosion to occur somewhere in the vicinity of BrandY's customer database. Of course the license manager checks the host name matches the license data...
To be categorized
(I collected brain dumps on the topic from people in real life last year, started adding the collected list, and just got burned out during editing of this page with adding, moving, gnoming etc, so here's the gist of the remainder:)
Power tools -- bandsaw, jigsaw, rotarysaw, jackhammer, hydraulicLift
Hand tools -- crowbar, screwdriver, wrench, level
particles - electron, proton, neutron, photon, neutrino, quark, gluon, meson (and categories: lepton, boson, baryon...)
Las Vegas casinos - Mandalay...
currencies - peso, pound, dinaro...
cars - mustang, chevy
classic tv shows - gilligan's island, jeopardy... (comment: classics are best; anti-TV people 'might have heard of some old show, but might not be aware of the existence of the new CSI:Podunk show that you're so fond of :-)
elements - hydrogen...ummm...nope, there's only one element in the universe.
Sporadic Finite Simple Groups (never mind, no one named their computers after those, I'm just getting punchy)
I got 4 machines one day and called them gort, klaatu, barada, and nikto.
{I got 4 Windows machines one day and called them shit, fuck, damn, and hell. However, I had to change that when a colleague began saying things such as:}
- Him: "Damn, shit's fucked up".
- Me: "You mean damn went to DllHell or shit."
- Him: "Hell has DLL problems?"
- Me: "No, I'm asking if shit is fucked to hell."
- Him: "No, hell can connect to shit, but it's fucked up."
- Me: "So you uploaded hell's files to fuck?"
- Him: "No, shit's fucked up, hell is fine."
- Me: "I thought you said damn's fucked up?"
- Him: "Hell, what the fuck are you giving me this shit about?"
- Me: "I didn't give you shit, I gave you hell to work on."
- Him: "Hell, I thought you gave me shit over fuck, dammit."
- Me: "Fuck this shit, I'm going to lunch."
- Him: "No, shit is fucked, I keep telling you."
- Me: "Bye! Oh, and get your shit together or you'll catch hell."
(Apologies to Abbot & Costello)
shit just got real...
See TipsForNamingComputers
Humor
"RFC 2100 - The Naming of Hosts" (not to be confused with the serious RFC 1178)
"Coolest Hostnames"
Other
CategoryNaming
Names Given To Computers