Norse and greek gods do seem to be popular, I’d studied and worked at several places that follow that scheme. There’s a large scope for spelling mistakes though, as the article points out.
Best scheme I’ve used (if you can ignore the silliness) is Pokémon characters. There’s hundreds of them (and guaranteed to be more by the time you run out), the names are all fairly easy to spell and you’ve got pre-made iconography for connection shortcuts :)
Hmm... every corporate place I've ever heard of uses acronyms related to the location and purpose of the machine.
If a machine gets repurposed, it typically gets wiped and reidentified.
My college used Pokemon names, incidentally. Which seems to work out pretty well since they keep adding new ones and none of them have accents or special glyphs.
A lot of the names tend to sound good as computer names. It's hard to talk about machines named Bart or Spock or Frodo without getting a little embarrassed (IMO). But a computer named 'reliant' or 'intrepid' is pretty sweet.
A friend of mine has a small business and he gave his machines the names of drinks and put the respective bottle on top of each machine: whisky, vodka, rum, etc.
That was done with beers at the systems lab at my old school. Machines could be renamed if you brought in the professor who ran it a 6-pack of the beer you wanted to be the name.
My home systems use Tolkien names, which while by no means an original idea, has the benefit that they will never run out, especially if you've read The Silmarillion. At work, the names are all music-related. I didn't start this one, but I carried it on after the admin who started it left. This also works well, aside from coworkers complaining that they can't remember how to spell 'staccato'.
When naming/labelling physically the servers two main things to be taken for consideration.
SECURITY and CONVENIENCE
SECURITY : When other persons have physical view/access to our servers they should not be able to locate the role of servers by our namings like WEB , DB , PROD , TESTING etc. By this weakness they know which machine to attack.
CONVENIENCE : Our sysadmin should be able to identify server with ease.
We name by Rack , Location and Position. Example R1CA12 i.e Machine is in Rack1 California and 12th Server. This will ease our Remote Network Operations Center engineer to know the position and coordinate with local sysadmin .
At a former workplace the theme was sci-fi authors. At one point I noticed that all the Windows and Linux boxen were named after men and the Macs after women, which seemed vaguely appropriate, so that became a further informal convention. Mostly the names were chosen arbitrarily, but we had a G4 iMac which was called 'shelley' for presumably non-arbitrary reasons.
For my personal machines I decided to implement the same male/female scheme but for a theme I am using 'people somehow associated with Pink Floyd' e.g. vera, torry, storm, mallet, emily. I used to joke that if Apple ever came out with an x86 Mac I would have to call it 'layne', but they did, and I realized that PF (to my knowledge) only ever did one song about a transvestite, so that would not be a sustainable convention. :)
This wouldn't work very well for a business that had servers spread out far and wide, but my current theme is cities. Used to be Russian cities - Moskva, Leningrad, Irkutsk, etc. I've since switched to cities in Texas - Dallas, Austin, Houston. (Though I'm keeping Moskva forever.)
I work at a large university with a fairly flat domain. This means just about every computer is is name.university.edu, and every computer needs a name for the central database. The hardest part about this naming is avoiding conflicts. Most "common" naming schemes were taken two decades go, so adding a little prefix allows me to reuse a lot of names. Basically, adding another prefix exponentially grows the name space.
I opted for the most boring naming system because it made logical sense. [department abrev]-[PI abrev]-[usage abrev][Number]. This leads to names like ee-she-s03 for the third server for the Sheron group in the electrical engineering department. I can always create aliases for stuff that's commonly referenced.
At one place, we started off with beowulf and grendel, but then rapidly discovered that many of the other names are pretty much impossible. Stuff like hrothgar, healfdene, and so on.
Authors were a good one for an on-line bookseller I worked for (not Amazon). One of my current gigs has wines: merlot, cabernet, pinot, shiraz, etc...
At work, we use pet names (that is, we name machines after employee pets) and the virtual servers all get city names. I tend towards obscure towns in Florida (where we're located) while the other employees tend towards more famous cities.
I have to say I just LOVE HN --- I've been thinking about this for quite a while and was planning to ask "How do you name your machines" today and just found this article ... Problem solved! Thanks! :)
For internal servers we name them after hot girls: kaila, tila, evelyn, jenna, etc. You can always be assured a steady stream of hot women in the world.
One of the companies I worked in used names of Hindu gods and goddesses. There are quite a few of those, and each god has multiple names so we never ran out.
Best scheme I’ve used (if you can ignore the silliness) is Pokémon characters. There’s hundreds of them (and guaranteed to be more by the time you run out), the names are all fairly easy to spell and you’ve got pre-made iconography for connection shortcuts :)