Some people call them after family members. Some people call them after animals. And the Lord of the Rings series of books and Greek mythology seem to be an eternally popular sources of inspirations. What am I talking about here? Kids names? No, server names, of course!

David Stennett, a freelance contractor specializing in program and project management who’s old enough to know better, gets his ideas from the sky at night and cartoons:

I usually name my servers using either 1. Planets (the bigger the server, the greater the name … big servers named Jupiter1, Jupiter2, etc … smaller servers or desktops … Mercury, etc.) or 2. Transformers (servers named after larger transformers like Devastator, Omega Supreme, Unicron; desktops named after normal Autobots or Decepticons).

According to one of the chaps over at Diskeeper Corporation – who, to spare his blushes, I shall allow to remain anonymous - they once went down the Greek mythology route (Athena, Atlas, Janus, etc.), but have since adopted a much less interesting approach:

We have since standardized our servers with a naming convention of 3 letter location > Server Function > Number of Server.

*yawn* How to suck the fun out of life!

The anonymous source did, however, share one interesting tidbit:

We still name our workstations different names because honestly it’s easier to associate a person with a unique name than it is to associate with a number. I think workstations seem to work better that way. We normally choose a “gamer” association. Like my computer’s name is “Vespene” for the toxic gas in the Star Craft series …

I’ll pass no … erm … comment on that at all except to say that I pity his colleagues!

Lee Clemmer, CISSP, MCSE, SSCP, RHCE, finds his inspiration in Norse Mythology (well, at least it makes a change from the Greek stuff!).

The guys at a well-known security company – I shan’t name and shame them - are surprising dull:

We don’t use anything tremendously interesting for server names.  QA1… QA3 for QA department servers, SAN for the SAN server and so forth.

C’mon chaps, you can do better than that! Even the bad guys  are more imaginative. According to Steve Mallard, MCP, MCT, CNDA and Certified Ethical Hacker:

We once experienced a DoS attack from a server named … TinkerBell.

So, what do you call yours? Care to share?