
Choosing a Name for Your Computer  - nickb
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/fyi/fyi5.html
======
xirium
From the article: "Don't overload other terms already in common use."

I heard that Nokia named a set of meeting rooms after cities. This was changed
after it cost a small fortune in cancelled flights.

From the article: "Avoid alternate spellings."

An ex-colleague named servers after his favourite punk and metal bands, many
of which have unusual spellings. Furthermore, it doesn't give the right
impression if you name your mail server megadeth

~~~
maw
Many of the offices I've worked in have named meeting rooms after cities. But
there was never any confusion -- I guess when you say "the meeting's in Milan
in 5 minutes" there isn't any ambiguity.

(I did try to get out of a few meetings in that room by claiming I was too
sexy for it. Never worked.)

------
maw
The nerdiest scheme I encountered was naming machines after elements, and
matching the last part their IPs with the atomic number of the element in
question.

------
edu
For some years now I name my computers after famous scientists/inventors (in
the broad sense of these words)

I.e.: galileo, newton, leibnitz, curie, marconi...

------
LogicHoleFlaw
Be careful not to choose sets of names which are _too_ common though. Trying
to integrate two separate systems, each of which was named after the Greek
pantheon, can be very painful.

------
wmeredith
Home network:

Airports - Tonto, Robin, and Pokey.

Computers - Lone Ranger, Batman, and Gumbi.

~~~
apathy
When I worked at Cornell, we had a habit of naming pairs or groups of machines
that were related (eg. as failovers, or multimasters, or whatever) so that the
grouping was obvious enough to stick. Hack/slash, itchy/scratchy,
homer/bart/marge, etc. My officemate and I had Indigo2's named squish and
squash, for example.

I've done the same thing ever since, and if you look at truly huge
deployments, you end up developing a lexicon that exists solely to indicate
where and what a machine is. eg. "what's wrong with pyj121-200? the whole rack
is flapping!" "oh it looks like a bad blade in pyextbr2" "well open a ticket
to swap the blade tonight then! it's hanging index transfers!" Datacenter,
rack, machine. Simple.

Meanwhile, at some of the smaller deployments I've done, there are machines
named after porn stars (lovelace/holmes were a couple of onsite/offsite RAID
monstrosities; bildo/remsen were hot and cold firewall nodes), musicians
(mingus/parker/coltrane/monk), and so on. Functional or physical relationships
as indicated by lexical relationships are a relatively convenient shorthand,
and if one machine turns into a farm, you have lovelace1, lovelace2,
lovelace3...

Just some musings. Thank god I don't work ops anymore.

