Ask HN: How do you name your servers?

At Viaweb we used to name them after Tintin characters.

Gandalf,Isaac,Einstein

Mine is the setup with One Piece characters as OP mentioned. This also includes my dev computers. Our setup is thus:

Prod for my LLC is Luffy since he is the captain. My desktop is Zoro since the desktop is the most powerful computer I have. My laptop is Usopp since I work with it the most and I sort of identify with that character. Another client server is Franky because that client was weird. A client server I setup once is Robin since that name wasn't taken.

Each character is sort of vaguely descriptive of the machine they name.

Another scheme I worked with once was physics words for movement. The dev machine was impetus, staging was acceleration, and prod was velocity.

I once got burned with putting funny filler text on a live production site. Naming servers creatively is a safer way of having fun that is also more subtle.

At a past job we used named of ski resorts (killington, okemo, snowbird,...). Although I always though it would be interesting to choose a music genre and go big - like 90s rap stars (2pac, jayz, Wu-Tang Clan, ..)

Just my My 2 cents -

Pick something that has a meaning to the person running it and some what relates to the organization.

role-colo-index, e.g. wwwsf27.domain.com

i'm boring as hell.

We use the cast from Seinfeld (Kramer, Babu, SoupNazi etc...)

A long time ago, I was fond of a young woman whose family was originally from Denmark. As the ultimate testament to my love, I named my computer 'danish'. Breakfast-themed computer names followed the in-joke: eggs, toast, waffle.

Years later, having moved on, I switched to jazz musicians (I play the saxophone.) coltrane, gillespie, parker.

When I can, I enjoy naming them things like "Megahertz" or "my RAM" so that when they crash, people sound silly. "My RAM is down" or "Megahertz isn't working"

I name my servers all after the muppets. There's something about typing ssh me@misspiggy that makes me smile.

Dan Schultz wrote a great article on some naming conventions he uses that was inspired by Starcraft. http://slifty.com/2011/03/starcraft-network/

Recently I've used the moons of Saturn (there are 60 of them): https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Saturns_moons. They're beautiful and unusual names.

Toho monsters (Godzilla, Mothra, etc.).

LotR characters: laptop is Legolas, brawny web server is Aragorn, dependable media server is Samwise, old laptop was Frodo, etc.

I use ancient Egyptian deities (Anubis, Ra, Osiris, Horus, Isis...)

Not servers, but here, we've named our database usernames from Futurama characters.

Lately? ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

In the past I've gone through Futurama, LoTR, The Simpsons, Saturn's moons and musicians.

At a previous job we used scientific words, with the exception that our boss had to be able to spell it at 3am if he got paged.

Lots of fun names there, but the best were the HA or failover pairs. Proton/Neutron, Concave/Convex, Diffusion/Effusion.

In college: beer names (i.e. shiner-bock) At first job: characters from 'The Simpsons' Later on at first job: elements (i.e. Fluoride) At current gig: something amenable to Chef like component-worker-01.environment01.foo.employer.com

All of my computers are named after characters from Dune (thus far only the first book). Three of them were named after one character, with multiple names.

Snakes here: mamba, taipan, rattlesnake and viper so far.

At work we use British fighter jets. Unfortunately, unlike the US, the British have pretty lame fighter jet names ('puffin', for example).

Just pick something with a lot of cool sounding names - makes announcing server changes way more badass.

Guardian and Colossus

For anything serious I'd go with a numbering scheme, see [1] for examples and ideas. If it has to be names, the elements of the periodic system seem to be somewhat popular, see [2] for more lists.

Apart from that: I named my second computer[3] after a character from a book I was reading at the time. I didn't yet know it was the villain when I chose the name, so the name was not what I intended it to be. I stuck with the convention anyway.

It's always from a book I am currently reading or I have read recently and most of the time I choose the villains. Because virtual machines need names as well and I create them faster than I can read books I allowed characters from movies for anything virtual.

The nice thing about it is that it connects the machines to a period of my life (when I was reading a certain book or seeing a movie for the first time).

    [1] http://serverfault.com/questions/17274/
    [2] http://namingschemes.com/
    [3] My first computer was a C64 and had no name, other than C64:-)

Here at Chess.com we name them after Chess grandmasters (go figure). Capablanca, Glek, Krush, and so on.

I use names from Alice in Wonderland.

whitequeen is my macbook, while my gaming rig is bandersnatch. The wifi id is throughthelookingglass, while the Timecapsule is called thecheshirecat, my iPhone is the dormouse.

I've some unnamed devices laying around that I've been meaning to get to :)

As A chem minor, I like anything chemical, Thorium is my most used VPS.