Last month we looked into the practice of naming servers, half expecting to discover it was a quirky, geeky thing to do -- and nothing more. To our surprise, readers flooded the story with comments, chiming in about their own naming schemes -- what worked, what didn't, and flashes of brilliance. Let's just say that server naming is a surprisingly complex undertaking. Here's what we learned.
What's in a name?
The practice of naming servers and other machines was born of the basic need to distinguish among machines. In fact, as one reader reminds us, this was a convention in factories long 'before computers ever existed. It helped people working on the machines distinguish which one they were talking about when they had dozens or hundreds of the same machine on the factory floor.'
And, let's face it, naming things is just part of being human. "Anthropomorphizing gear is a very nice way of making sure that people remember what it does and kind of care for it," says Retep Vosnul. "Picking a suitable name [for] a server is very satisfying as well. For example, a server that needs to have very high service uptime, you might want to give a name that reflects that.... I used Belgarath (7000 year old wizard) and other characters from the Eddings novels and I used to use A'tuin and other Discworld persona for other networks. My former employer did not want names for some reason and I never felt at home in that datacenter, it lacked something."
Courting disaster
If uptime is important to you, why tempt fate?
Consider the case of one reader who named a Windows 
Or what about the government agency that named all their servers after disasters? With a main server called Hindenberg (as it used to go down so often), why would you take the chance of backing it up with a server called Titanic?
And then there's the "meaningful" naming convention gone awry: "When told to move to a global standard," a reader writes, "we were told to name Norway's mail server to NOMAIL (at the mail server level), and Canada's physical server name to CANTMAIL (NT was to signify the OS)."
Now that is courting disaster.
Up to the job
You might think it would be too literal-minded to name a machine after its function but there's something downright elegant about printers named after writers or a plotter named "Moriarty" after the Mr. Moriarty who continually 'plotted' against Sherlock Holmes.
Mail servers, in particular, seem to make good targets for job-based names. MikeH names his servers after constellations, with the mail server being Pegasus, of course. Jim Haynes "always wanted to have a mail server named Norman Mailer." And one reader named his outgoing SMTP server "Newman" from the Seinfield television series. "When it relays to other servers it sends the command 'HELO newman'."
Glenn continued this theme, naming his mail server Hermes, his domain controllers Zeus and Hera, and a tech playground Eris (the goddess of discord). At home his machines are: Tyr (the war driving laptop), Castor and Pollux (a dual boot machine) and Athena (the server).
One if by land...
The natural world is a, er, natural place to look for server naming schemes. One anonymous reader writes that in his Colorado-based company, "the servers are all named after the various 14ers (mountains > 14k feet). This was started by an admin a few years back who set up most of the servers and whose father was in the process of hiking all of the mountains. Between Elbert, Massive, Challenger, Pyramid, Blanca, Crestone, and the rest of the gang, it's a bit of a hike (mentally) to keep them all straight. But darn if I don't hate Quandary some days."
But if it's an ecosystem you're looking for, you might turn to the sea. "All of the groups of systems I've been responsible for over the years had something of an 'ecosystem'," writes one reader. "The best one was based on the notion that test servers would be slower and less functional than production servers. The overarching theme was undersea creatures, production systems getting names like barracuda and test systems getting names like sponge, coral and my favorite, nudibranch. It just so happens that nudibranch became the overall test server for orgs far and wide and I was questioned about the tastefulness of the name more than once. No one ever forgot the name though."
"In our company," writes another reader, "we named servers after fish. steelhead, sturgeon, walleye, king. But the best was 'crappy'. None of our customers wanted to be on crappy."
An eye on the sky
"Most of my machine names come from stars," says egon. "The hardest part is picking a name that short and easy to spell. Some over the years... Nova, Aurora, Polaris, Celaeno, and Orion. All my firewalls have been named Turais, it means 'little shield'. The best machine name was my P6 FreeBSD server. It was held together with duct tape, had sharp edges, was black and safety orange. Hazard."
Another reader writes that his company quickly ran through the planets and their moons and "began using, in order, the standard list of (thousands of) smaller asteroids, in order of discovery. The christening of a new server involved learning about the new mythological character, and always helped me keep them straight.... All my workstations are, therefore named after astronomers, since they watch the skies."
And this word of warning from Jeff, who chimed in about a place he worked where the "servers were named after the planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc. Which was all well and fine, until in a meeting someone stood up and admitted we were 'pulling financial data out of Uranus."
LoTR
What article about server naming would be complete without a nod to Lord of the Rings? There are plenty of names to go around and the roles carry particular meaning. One reader, for example, named his "various development boxes after Tolkien names in Middle Earth. Of course, the
"For our research," writes a grad student, "we got many laptops, and I was the first one to pick the names. First we got three, so I named them after the three elven rings from lord of the rings: Narya, Nenya and Vilya. Later my advisor ordered a fourth one, that happened to have slightly better specifications. I thought it would be just perfect to name that 'theOne,' and my advisor being a team player agreed, funny enough he ended up taking over the computer, and we didn't see it for more than a year and a half... and then one day ... it resurfaced, I thought that was very funny, just like the real one ring."
Too clever for their own good
"At U.C. Santa Cruz," writes Jim Haynes, "the acronym for the computing organization was CATS, so the machines were named for famous cats. Except the file servers for the Athena system were named with Greek puns, like Ailurophile (cat lover), Dendrophile (tree lover), etc. At U.C. Berkeley they have a thing of naming things as puns on celebrities. Thus the shuttle that runs between the campus and the BART station is Humphrey Go-Bart. Their first VAX machine was named Ernie Co-Vax."
Another reader writes that in a previous job, they "named all the servers after computer scientists:
Fileserver: Bernoulli
Auto-build machine: Babbage
Firewall: Schneier
CVS server: Ritchie
Router: Metcalfe
One day he had to explain the naming convention to Mr. Metcalfe when he responded to a thread on a forum board about an issue we were having."
Rules for success
Like so many things in life, you know a good naming scheme when you see it, but there are a few things you may want to consider:
- Choose a theme that provides enough names that you won't run out. "All of the machines on my home network (laptops, printers, desktops, routers, cell
phones , iPods, portable hard disks, Wii, PS3, etc.) are named after Peanuts characters," says Kwami. "It all started 5 years ago with my laptop named Snoopy, and it's gone on since then. Unfortunately, I'm running out of names!" - Steer clear of "meaningful" names: they're boring and they're not at all as meaningful as they seem. One anonymous reader writes that in his company, there is one server "whose name has not changed in the last ten years - even as we have rebuilt its functions onto different hardware, the name keeps being returned to SERVER. Yup, that's right - a file server named Server. This name was chosen by the same person who decided naming our printers after presidents was too confusing and insisted we give them location names instead - like 5Counter (a printer on a countertop on the 5th floor) and 4Cabinet (a printer on a cabinet on the 4th floor)."
- Spelling matters. Choose names that are too long or complicated and users will get confused and make mistakes. One anonymous reader named servers after characters from Greek, Roman and Egyptian Mythology, each covering a separate operating district. Unfortunately, the naming scheme wasn't in operation a month before he was asked to change it. It seems people couldn't remember how to spell Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Ashtoreth, Aesculapius, etc.
- Don't choose something too dear to your heart. One reader writes that he named machines after classical composers but drew the line at Wagner because he didn't want to subject it to the mangled mispronunciation that befell Haydn, Bizen, and Grieg.
- Go with what you know. A reader writes that he "decided a while ago to go with a Greek Mythology theme for my boxes. About a year ago, my mother's laptop started having problems with both the battery and the power adapter. She gave it to me, and I named it Oedipus, because I recognized it as a Greek name, but couldn't bring to mind the story. I recently looked it up, and I feel cold inside."
- Still unsure where to start? Read these "official" rules for computer naming
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