Given that, as you say, it all ends up in a database anyhow, at work where we have ~100 machines or so with various name, there simply is no scheme. Why should there be? The real key is that it's in the database and we enforce that (via saying that if you grab something and it's taken, the database wins), but beyond that it's all just artificial anyhow. We have romanized japanese numbers and characters from Zork, the Hitchhiker's Guide, and the Legend of Zelda, places where one person took their favorite photos (used as logos for the machines), several other vague schemes I've only caught wind of since I'm not part of the relevant groups, and straight-up utilitarian naming ("printer.subdomain") and so on, and it doesn't cause a problem. (IT itself does have its own naming scheme, we're engineering. It makes good sense for IT, I think.)
Given that, as you say, it all ends up in a database anyhow, at work where we have ~100 machines or so with various name, there simply is no scheme. Why should there be? The real key is that it's in the database and we enforce that (via saying that if you grab something and it's taken, the database wins), but beyond that it's all just artificial anyhow. We have romanized japanese numbers and characters from Zork, the Hitchhiker's Guide, and the Legend of Zelda, places where one person took their favorite photos (used as logos for the machines), several other vague schemes I've only caught wind of since I'm not part of the relevant groups, and straight-up utilitarian naming ("printer.subdomain") and so on, and it doesn't cause a problem. (IT itself does have its own naming scheme, we're engineering. It makes good sense for IT, I think.)