Gadgetopia

Planet names; Mars, Saturn, Pluto.

At bigger companies, server naming gets boring — usually some combination of letters and numbers denoting their location, among other information.

A former employer of mine took this approach ("boring") and applied it to database entities as well. For instance, and human resources table would have been something like HRT10000 with views being HRV10000, HRV10010, etc. each with a different slice of the underlying table.

At first it was a bit confusing, but it became second nature after awhile.

I am all for names that have meaning, so I guess I prefer the boring.

My company uses space related names for our Db servers. Our production server is Sol, while the two test boxes are Lunar and Titan.

This reminds of the nameservers for our ISP - CBeyond.

to.cbeyond.net infinity.cbeyond.net beyond.cbeyond.net

I guess they loved Toy Story as much as I did.

Currently I'm working with machines named after stars(procyon, canopus, vega...).

I worked at a huge company where we had different schemes for different divisions. Clusters I remember: Car models with a bent 'twards hi-performance(3000gt, stealth...). Plus the somewhat predictable Star Trek ships.

Personally I name machines using the Greek mythology(chiron, cerberus, athena).

A client of mine named their servers after Disney characters. One server, named Flounder, was a constant source of problems. For some reason, they renamed the server, and the server stopped floundering.

Be careful using company trademarks in your naming. I worked for a company that used car names (Porsche, Jaguar, Beetle...) as product code names. The names leaked to customers and we eventually received a cease and desist from one of the car makers.

When I attended the Univ. of Texas in the early '90's, some of their public servers were named after characters from Matt Groening's Life In Hell comics. Telnet-ing into servers like Binky and Bongo to check email always gave me a chuckle -- of course, for those not in the know, there was probably some head-scratching about those names.

I am all for names that have meaning, so I guess I prefer the boring.

I've found that the problem with names that have meaning is that some time meanings can change.

For instance, if I have a location naming code, and my web server is in Seattle at the 12th floor data center, rack 10, third server, it might be STL12_10C. Everyone learns that that's the name they load their punch-the-monkey banners to.

So one day we decide to move the web server to Cleveland, where it will need to be CLE05_23B. There is great wailing and gnashing of teeth because the name changed and now all sorts of scripts and configuration have to be changed as well.

A previous employer used this scheme on desktops, which meant that everyone's PC's had to have name changes when they moved desks (that happened often). So rather than just unplugging the machine and plugging it in again at the new desk, a tech would have to come over with admin access, change the NT name of every machine, then reinstall any software (like SQL Server) that broke when the name changed.

It seems that naming things after their location essentially subverts the purpose of DNS, which is to make the machine addressable regardless of the network structure. Random names are a better plan, IMHO, since they provide meaning to the users without carrying along any sort of secondary meaning that may break later.

beer/brewing companies?

I worked at a company where we did Simpson's names, which was fun. We now do cartoon characters similar to your Warner Bros. reference.

My all time favorite was back in college with 5 roommates, and about 2-3 computers each we went with a Star Wars theme. The servers were named for things like the Death Star and the clients were Yoda, Vader, etc. How can you beat that?!

I remember I worked at a company where an internal message thread sprung up because one group was using the names of Disney's Seven Dwarfs for servers, and other countries liked the idea. So basically the thread became a "How do you say the names of the Seven Dwarfs in as many languages as possible" thing, so other countries could follow suit. I printed out a hard copy and still have it somewhere around here.

i like cocktail names ... mojito, anyone?

A company I worked for had two themes: Lord of the Rings characters (predictable) and Greek philosopher/scientists. I rather liked the Greek ones.

I'm originally from Alabama, so I tend to use the South as my naming scheme. Being from Mobile, that's my desktop.

The gateway machine is Atlanta, because, to get anywhere at all from the South, one must fly through Atlanta. [The running joke is that, should one die in the South, you'll go through Atlanta on the way to Heaven or Hell.]

At one point, the box that served as voice mail/PBX was Jackson [home of MCI Worldcom].

Print server's are Faulkner and Harper [Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird].

The list goes on.

Names of The Simpsons characters, where my Dad works. Not sure what he'll do when they run out of charaters.

I used to work for a company where we used Star Trek characters like Picard, Worf, etc. Also one which used ship names, but now we use a boring combination of city and IP#.

I'm a techie for a school district, and we generally name our servers after computers from movies (generally malevolent ones). So far we've got a Deep Thought, WOPR, HAL, and I might even branch out and make my new project server a Cylon.

At one company I worked for in Italy, the admins named servers with women names (like alessia, marina, etc.).

A hosting company I'm dealing with at the moment names its servers afters clams (awful if you want my opinion).

The coolest naming scheme was one I was partially responsible for, at another company in Italy: we named our servers after wine names, so we had tocai as our CVS server, amarone and cartizze were two development servers, buttafuoco was the mail server and so on.

At a company I worked for the administrators decided to name the servers after disasters, knowing that the management would never see these names. However, soon one of the managers got a apache 404 error, showing the real name of the web server: titanic. A few months later the company went bankrupt, but as far as I know the server names were not involved.

buttafuoco was the mail server

That has an entirely different connotation in the United States.