I always find it fun to see how other people name their PCs. Do you have a certain theme around which you name your PCs? Or do you randomly assign them names you like? If so, which ones?
I’m currently naming them after the seven deadly sins, although the name is more attached to a certain function (eg. destkop, server,…) than a certain machine (because of svn):
[list]
[]destktop: ira (wrath)[/:m]
[]laptop: avaritia (greed)[/:m]
[]server: superbia (pride)[/:m]
[]Blade 100: invidia (envy)[/:m]
[]testbox: luxuria (lust)[/:m][/list:u]
Once I run out of sins I’ll probably start with the virtues
Main workstation : Drag00n, … because I love dragons
Laptop : Baal, the mother board has already burn twice
iMac : lol, for the moment as I didn’t find the time to install cool os on it
Server : gaïa (the mother of all rsync / ftp / http / cups on my network)
“Old laptop” : Daemon
“Old server” : Phoenix, because only the power supply and the case were on the first set
“Older server” : Test ( cyrix 166+ powa )
I’m a big fan of the wing commander games so I named my boxes after Wing Commander Characters:
desktop - Tolwyn (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Tolwyn]
server - Vaquero (Lieutenant Mitchell “Vaquero” Lopez: his most prized possession is a six-string guitar, which he is often found playing. He dreams of opening a cantina after the war. His devotion to music disappears in the cockpit, though.)
laptop - Tanaka([en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariko_Tanaka)
In my institute when we got our first Unix workstation in 1990 (a Sun 4/110), it was quite obvious to call it “helios”, “the” Sun. Then we got a few more, and since they were NIS slaves of the helios master, it was quite obvious to use the greek names of the planets (aphrodite, ares, zeus etc.) since we assumed “it is highly unlikely we will ever get more than 9” (I think we were in good company, Thomas J. Watson about “no more than 5 computers” and Hegel who demonstrated phylosophically planets should be 7 just in the year Le Verrier discovered the 8th.
For a while we got along with this (dumb windows PCs were satellites, the first Sun with Solaris was Asimovian solaria, an NT server was Superman’s krypton (and its xterminals followed as neon, xenon etc.), when we put the main workstation behind a firewall, the one open to the outer world was “oort” (from Oort’s cloud).
Now we have mainly given up on a common pattern, but many of the old names survive through the generations: I am writing from poseidon V 1/2
I tend to go for obscure, archaic and/or mythic, often related to the colour of the physical machine. So, for example, past machines have been called:
raven
hugin (one of Odin’s ravens, but I didn’t end up calling any machine “munin” which is the other raven)
alabaster (a tiny white netbook)
Current machines are:
obsidian (a black laptop)
pewter (a graphite-coloured laptop)
azure (black desktop, but it has pretty blue lights)
I pick my hostnames rather eclectically. I do pick a lot of names from fiction, but not consistently, and not from any one work, although some works do make multiple appearances. I will also sometimes have a theme for a given project, location, place of employment, etc.
