> What do you call your machines?
> At work I use the names of Graeco-Roman and Nordic gods and goddesses;
> thus we have Aphrodite, Minerva, Jupiter, Odin and Loki to name a few.
> AFAIK British Telecom seems to use the names of the rare earth elements
> for its customer-facing servers and I know of one multinational that
> uses artists' names - Picasso, Dali, Rembrandt etc.
> So what do you call yours?
>
> John
>
One of the companies whose network we acquired during a merger was using 
Bond villains for their mail servers, but the rest of the infrastructure 
had a more mundane naming convention.

I've always been fond of Flintstones character names.  Mostly in jest 
because people at work insist on naming standards that will fit any and 
all devices, and include stuff like city and building into the name, to 
make it easier to locate a device in case of problems.

So my retort was that, yes, having to remember that Fred, Wilma and 
Pebbles were front end web servers and Barney, Betty and Bam-Bam, the 
back-end databases means you need to remember things by heart, but it's 
no worse than having to remember IATA airport codes and that "T" in the 
4th position stands for "windows nT" because "W" was already taken by 
Web servers, and "N" for Lotus Notes.  (And that now that most servers 
are running 2003 or 2008, it makes even less sense for the people who 
weren't there back in '97 when the standard was devised)

And it's definitily much easier to scream "LOOK FOR A SERVER CALLED 
BAM-BAM!" than yelling "LOOK FOR 
ALPHA-CHARLIE-SIERRA-DELTA-YANKEE-WHISKEY-GOLF-ZERO-ONE-ZERO-ZERO-THREE" 
at a tech who's in a noisy computer room with bad phone reception, 
trying to find the right machine.
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