Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Years ago I liked to name my machines after planets.. over the years that went to pot and there are only 3 machines on my network named such. I got lazy, calling thing X11 X22, Octane1, Octane 2 etc.. even to a point one was named 'fuckit', I'll tidy it all up one day.

What's your naming convention?

uunix wrote: What's your naming convention?

Most machines here are named after rivers from the area I was born. As the number of machines grow, the area used to pick names grows as well.

For some years now I maintain a list of all my machines and started giving them better names (sorry uunix) than PC1, PC2, etc...

My network equipment is named after ancient gods (charon ( ferryman of Hades ) for the router; janus for the AP).
My printers are famous painters: vangogh and monet.
The PS3 is supermario.
The PCs are greek letters... up to theta.
The Silicon Graphics are named after the periodic table. Names are not reused. I am currently at aluminum. Unfortunately I was not naming my machines since the beginning, so that my first 4D/70GT never had a name...

i'm very boring in that regard. as far as the sgis go i just called them iris, iris2, iris3 ... in the order i got them
i like it tho because it's the original, classic name

I use words that I like.

bucket, mapplethorpe, godthaab, vanburen, malibu-barbie, shrdlu, angstrom, kaiju, fratricide, diesel... they're not always meant to be flattering. an amiga 3000 got named "laugh-track", and a boat anchor Proliant got named "epsilon-minus".

and so on.

Machines that are on the network get the names of the planets from C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. No particular reason why, other than that I love those books.

Mine are named after Game of Thrones characters.

Mine are greek mythology for network gear, and AC-47/119/130 variants (Spooky, Spectre, etc..) for computers.

I went for periodic table names for mine, but tried to get the names to have some sort of meaning for the type of machine they're for. My O2 was (boringly) Oxygen, the Indigo2 is Nitrogen (a Nitrogen deficiency in plants turns them purple), and the Fuel is Lithium (burns with a red flame).

I don't really have a naming convention for my PC(s), it's restricted to my SGI machines!

neymar, rijkaard, iniesta, guardiola, puyol, messi, abidal, xavi, etc...

Whatever seemed to match the machine

The only convention I have is that my machines have a short alias in my local DNS, so I don't have to type the long name every time. Other than that, I'm using the same "method" as duck.

toasty wrote: Mine are named after Game of Thrones characters.

Out of curiosity. My favourite character is 'Tyrion'. Which one of your boxes did you name after him?

Servers: Scandinavian cities, caused by stockholm originally, whose envisioned name was first kalgoorlie but I couldn't remember how to spell it. Currently the full time machines are thule, oslo, sondrestrom, oulu and uppsala. helsinki is retired, stockholm is a backup and museum piece, godthaab is now a disk duplicator and reykjavik was demoted to a client. Haven't assigned a copenhagen, tromso or linkoping yet.

Clients: First name of someone involved in their development, directly or otherwise. This G5 is bruce, after Bruce Horn, Apple Finder author. The SGIs are exceptions, named by colour, and Intel Macs don't get names because they suck.

Laptops: Names of dogs. Sometimes appropriate (the Ultra-3 is sparky; the TP800 is lucky, after Thomas Watson's favourite hunting dog).

For many years I named machines after LotR characters:

*nix main workstations: aragorn, gandalf
*nix one-offs and testbeds: gimli, gloin, bilbo, frodo, faramir
macbook airs: galadriel, legolas
network printer: treebeard
ms windows boxen: troll, orc, gollum, saruman

When I got my HP Proliant microserver,I broke with the Tolkien theme and started naming machines after their external colour:

HP proliant microserver: blackbox
HP zx6000 workstation: silverbox
SGI Fuel: redbox

At first, my SGI machines tended to get named after cartoon characters.

It all started with my Indigo2 Impact. When I unboxed it, I was quite surprised at how very purple it was in person. And it was old when I got it. Practically a dinosaur in computer terms. So it was named Barney, because what else do you call a purple dinosaur? That led to the Octane getting named Gumby, by virtue of being green and nearly (but not quite) rectangular.

The Indigo was named Ziggy, largely because I couldn't come up with anything better for him. Try pronouncing "SGI" as a single word rather than three letters. I figured Ziggy was the closest cartoon name I could come up with. Similarly the HP C8000 runs HP-UX and if you sound it out (the "H" is silent), the closest name I could come up with was Puck (but that's Shakespeare rather than a cartoon...sigh).

The Origin 300 is Orion. Because I figured Origin and Orion were linguistically close, and I'm not very creative. The fileserver with Xeon CPUs is Xena for similar reasons.

My SparcStation 20 runs primarily Solaris which sometimes gets shortened to "Sol" which sounds kinda-sorta like Saul. So that's it's name.

At one point there was a bit of a naming convention based on twisted logic and odd associations. Now it's more whimsical. Whatever makes me chuckle. There'll be a new fileserver here soon. I'm thinking it'll be Tyler. As in "Tyler the Filer". Because the rhyme is what I find amusing at the moment.

Well, if we're also adding network enabled devices, the printer and print servers are named for famous ... printers. currier was decommissioned but gutenberg (Brother HL-2070N) is still operational.

The network cameras are named for naughty: voyeur, poseur and frotteur.

I've used different themes at different places of employment - a few I came up with, some I walked into. Of those I walked into, I thought one of the most fun and amusing was using HP Lovecraft's Elder Gods for servers... But at large sites a system of local subway stops, public squares, and street names seemed to work well. Of course most larger, corporate sites I've worked at since 2000 eschewed names in favor of impersonal schemes reflecting location, sequence, and department: MEMUBE03, RCH09CICFLS.

On the personal side, since I've had the domain crash.com since 1994, the servers and desktops tend to be named after UNIX signals. Main fileserver is "io," webservers are "fpe" or "ill," general purpose server at home is "int" while the colo box running several VMs is "emt." My desktop is usually "abort."

I've also used different themes for different makes. The SGI servers are named after Pixar shorts - tintoy, knickknack, luxojr. The SGI workstations are just based on external characteristics so far - rosso for a Fuel, bluelight for an Octane where the white lamp was replaced with a blue LED.

Currently by colour for my machines, for the most part, with the IP address running alphabetically:

a5000 = Acorn A5000 (it's cream so would clash with clearbox) = .101
bluebox = Indigo2 (which may become tealbox if I set up the Octane permanently) = .102
clearbox = Pi in a clear acrylic case = .103
486elvis = PC-on-a-Eurocard inside the A5000 ("elvis" was the maker's codename for the board) = .104
epc = EspressoPC (should be "silverbox" but "epc" is shorter!) = .105
greybox = Acorn RiscPC = .107
pccard = 486DX co-processor in the RiscPC (whose NIC has a virtual second interface with IP .116)
redbox = Fuel = .118
whitepi = Pi2 in a white case = .123

Others have "unconventional" names (e.g. wife's laptop is "mine", i.e. hers rather than ours , entirely prosaic names ("lenovo" for my work laptop) or ones driven by finding a suitable gap in the alpahbetic IP scheme (e.g. "xarm" and .124 for the cream A540 that runs RISCiX, as "a" and "c" were already allocated).

When I mostly had Acorns the scheme was model number (a5000, r140, a540, riscpc) for the name and year of manufacture (19xx) for the IP address (93, 89, 91 and 94, then 95 for a Compaq Deskpro XL5/133 whose name I forget).

I'm boring and not caring of naming too much, so my rule is simple - name it by machine exterior.
For example:
big clumsy smartphone - brick
handheld clamshell device - powder
computer in pizzabox chassis - pizza
et cetera