Classic. I have a naming scheme for my personal laptops--female characters from sci fi series. I've had an aluminum PowerBook named Kira, a black MacBook named Dee, and an aluminum MacBook named Kara so far.
A nice naming scheme (for server names) I read about somewhere suggested following the periodic table. Element names can be used as the server names and corresponding element numbers as corresponding IP addresses (subnet suffix) of the servers.
There are other advantages to this naming scheme. Element abbreviations can be used as short DNS names. For example, both lithium and li could resolve to 192.168.1.3.
Also, groups of elements can correspond to types of computers. Halogens can be embedded devices, noble gasses can be gaming machines, alkali metals can be file servers, etc.
I name our servers after the asset tag numbers. DNS can then be used to provide an inventory of our data centers. It also ensures we have a programatic and automatic way to name machines, and numbers are remarkably memorable after a while.
There are lots of pools you could use that offer a vast amount of names, assuring that you never run out even if you have a very large number of hosts. Good examples in my opinion are names of things existing in real life, e.g. band names, names of famous (CS) people, ..., while fictional names (characters from some book) tend to run out too soon.
You could even partition hostnames, e.g. all workstations in room 1 are named after famous rock stars, all workstation in room 2 are named after famouse rappers, etc.
A big(ish) hosting company I once worked for used Caribbean islands. This rapidly turned out to be a mistake and it quickly turned into any islands, then cities, then god knows what :-)
My current scheme is using major LA thoroughfares (Pico, Victory, Ventura, etc) but as I'm unlikely to scale beyond two digits, I'm not worried ;-)
Only time I remember having interesting computer names out side of college, the companies lawyers put a squash to it. Infectious diseases just has so much creativity to it.
I suspect they were ok with "cholera", but someone in the legal department got upset with "ebola". I think the rest had been disabled by that point, and I'm sure they were already off the internal dns.
Fittingly, we name our servers after universities. Ivy League colleges are web-facing, the Pac-10 are database servers, and the Claremont colleges are dev boxes. Ultimately no scheme will hold up, but at least we have a few thousand pre-made names to use.
While looking at the serverfault thread linked somewhere in this post, I found the following site: http://www.namingschemes.com/
It's a whole wiki full of naming schemes. It actually included the one I am using (Battlestar Galactica callsigns), which I though should have been pretty unique.
My first naming scheme revolved around monkeys, I had spacemonkey, funkymonkey and.. I forget the third. That one didn't scale well.
For a short while I used characters from children's books (mom is a librarian who loves children's books), this included lafcadio, lorax and grinch.
Right now it's robots from Futurama. Bender, flexo (the Win XP dual-boot of bender, which is OSX), clamps, roberto (the crazy, stabbing robot), calculon and my dedicated server, robot-devil.
Not that anyone asked, but hey, naming schemes are fun!
For my personal systems, I choose names of demons (since they run lots of dæmons). I get a little thrill out of not knowing what to name something, and taking it as an excuse to go look up cool names.
I use names from various books, in no particular fashion. Most of my names are from Tad Williams books, but I've been known to use the names of Anne McCaffrey's dragons as well, with some names from Norse mythology tossed in for good measure.
My current workstation is pfefirrit. In the past, I've had fizz, click, karthwine, ninebirds, nuzzledark, nipslither, bast-imret, earnotch, and knet-makri as servers. My old workstations were cloudleaper, bite-then-bark, pop, hushpad, and tailchaser. My firewall was meerclar.
As far as laptops go, I've used munin, hugin, odin, krelli, skoggi, krauka, nrefa-o, mnanth, and caylith.
Back when I did IT for a couple of schools, I used chemical compounds in a certain fashion to reflect room numbers.
I've never seen that before. When I was in college, I named all my machines after songs by Orbital. This worked pretty well since they were, back then, cranking out a new album every couple of years or so. I added chime, midnight, and halcyon to Google Sets to see what it would come up with and every other suggestion on its list was the name of an Orbital song. Nice.
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[ 162 ms ] story [ 2015 ms ] threadAlso, groups of elements can correspond to types of computers. Halogens can be embedded devices, noble gasses can be gaming machines, alkali metals can be file servers, etc.
Also, hydrogen - firewall/GW, oxygen - mail server, carbon - public web server, iron - source repository.
You could even partition hostnames, e.g. all workstations in room 1 are named after famous rock stars, all workstation in room 2 are named after famouse rappers, etc.
My current scheme is using major LA thoroughfares (Pico, Victory, Ventura, etc) but as I'm unlikely to scale beyond two digits, I'm not worried ;-)
I suspect they were ok with "cholera", but someone in the legal department got upset with "ebola". I think the rest had been disabled by that point, and I'm sure they were already off the internal dns.
Oops. My work computer is Spaz, my iPhone is Dirty Sanchez and my laptop is Dingleberry.
It's a whole wiki full of naming schemes. It actually included the one I am using (Battlestar Galactica callsigns), which I though should have been pretty unique.
For a short while I used characters from children's books (mom is a librarian who loves children's books), this included lafcadio, lorax and grinch.
Right now it's robots from Futurama. Bender, flexo (the Win XP dual-boot of bender, which is OSX), clamps, roberto (the crazy, stabbing robot), calculon and my dedicated server, robot-devil.
Not that anyone asked, but hey, naming schemes are fun!
My current workstation is pfefirrit. In the past, I've had fizz, click, karthwine, ninebirds, nuzzledark, nipslither, bast-imret, earnotch, and knet-makri as servers. My old workstations were cloudleaper, bite-then-bark, pop, hushpad, and tailchaser. My firewall was meerclar.
As far as laptops go, I've used munin, hugin, odin, krelli, skoggi, krauka, nrefa-o, mnanth, and caylith.
Back when I did IT for a couple of schools, I used chemical compounds in a certain fashion to reflect room numbers.
Here's some I've used:
- tau-zero
- subtleknife
- Dark Light (iPhone)
- Omega Device (iPod Nano - I like this one :)
- skyroad
- zodiac
Troi (MacBook), Picard (iMac), Locutus (Mini), Crusher (MBP).
At uni, most of the computers were named after distilleries. i.e. Livet, Morangie, Grant, Islay etc.
I'd probably avoid Eyjafjallajokull, though.