Naming Conventions
We had a discussion at work the other day, and again on IRC recently, about what to name our computers. At first this might sound like a silly thing, especially to people who use a single home computer, but for people with more than one at home or who use computers every day at work, it's something that you probably end up thinking about at some point.
All of my computers at home are named after "characters" in books. This computer is Defiant, named after a spaceship in Bill Baldwin's Galactic Convoy novel. My file server is Naruto after the manga character, and my notebook is named Runcible, after a much higher-tech device that is the center of the Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age.
I tend to be pragmatic about my server naming because there are just too darn many of them to remember, but many people and organizations give them more fanciful names. For example, A Small Orange uses characters from the show Lost to name their servers, as I noticed when editing some of my content on Hurley.
I've heard of some (extremely geeky) people using Star Trek ship classes and Star Wars planet names as computer names. One of the criteria, I suppose, for choosing a set of names is that you have enough for your entire network, because you don't want Moe, Larry, Curly, and Fred. The Seven Dwarfs might work well if you only have seven machines, but certainly doesn't work for twelve.
I wonder if anyone has any more imaginative name sets for their computers. Even if it's just one, you know you have to name it.
Comments
Comment by Morydd on .
I use villains to name my machines. I use males for the wired ones and the females for the wireless. (If you need that explained, I won't be the one to explain it to you.)
So far I've got Locutis (a misspelling of Locutus), Kahn (Genghis, not Star Trek), Caliban, Loki, Grendel, Medea, Salome, Ophelia (not really a villain, but female villians are hard to find).
Comment by Alan on .
I use suits of cards, though I only ever have one, maybe two computers at a time. At the moment, this computer is Diamonds and the MacBook is Clubs.
Comment by Justin Moore on .
I've got a post about how I name my servers at work, as well as a bit here about a little-known service from Google to help in such cases.
Comment by moeffju on .
Mine are named after Scottish places. The work PCs are named after seas and lakes, the 'net servers follow a uber+something weird scheme, Napalm Riot servers are named after discordianist stuff. Other networks I set up had computers named after gems, famous droids, movie titles and fictional countries. And, of course, there were the obligatory Trek, Star Wars, and animé references.
Comment by moeffju on .
Oh, and I forgot the computers at the OTHER work place, where the workstations were named after philosophers, and the servers were Buddha, Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma.
Comment by Michael on .
I work for IT at a large company and we use Star Wars for EVERYTHING, DCs are Anakin, Amidala, DarthVader, Dooku, JarJar, others include our SSID for the wireless TheOuterRim, e-mail server is R2D2(messanger to Amidala). The list goes on and on... Really took me some time to figure it out.