On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Tim Hall wrote:

TH>Makes a change from the standard Tolkien or Monty Python names used by
TH>IT departments, I suppose. 

We have no naming conventions at the bank; each machine has its own name
for whatever reason struck someone's fancy at the time.  Since most of our
servers are little bitty application-specific servers, most have dull
names (sometimes required by the app and/or the company/agency that owns
the server)... "ForTrac" for the ForTrac FOReclosure TRACking server,
"Sendero" for the Sendero server, etc.  And all the branch servers,
including the main server here (DOWNTOWN) are named after the branches.  
Yawn yawn.

Our only interesting critters are Mauve (because "it has the most RAM,"
which is from a Dilbert strip), Il_Postino the mail server, and... uh...
rats.  Our newest server (which isn't even on the network yet, or I'd be
able to look it up) is named after a character from the movie Office
Space, but darned if I can remember what the server is going to be for, or
I'd know.  Our AS/400's are named FATMAN and LITTLBOY, the former being a
back-formation from the latter... Little Boy is our test machine, and
always has blue paper loaded (bluebar in the big printer, blue bond in
the laser) to distinguish it, but the original "Little Boy Blue" was too
long for the eight-character netname, so it just got named Little
Boy... the big production box didn't really have a name (it was the only
AS/400 before that, so it was just "the AS/400"), so it got retroactively
named FATMAN, by logical extension.  It almost got renamed TRINITY when it
got upgraded, but we decided that was chronologically inaccurate, and it
stayed FATMAN by momentum.  (It has been proposed that we rename LITTLBOY
"Jake" to be more politically correct, but if we did *that* we'd end up
with FATMAN mutating into "Elwood.")

My prior employer, the airline, had a single server when I hired on...
named "SERVER."  S/36's have no names (when they're not networked,
anyway).  When I left, we had a new server: "RYANONE" (after the tradition
of naming flagship aircraft _____ One), and two AS/400's, one named
BIGIRON (which cracked up IBM every time, because it was a very small
AS/400), the other named ACCOUNT (because accountants aren't very
creative).

Anyway, the Wirebird/Phoenyx machines have somehow fallen into a bird
motif.  The Linux server (the one that really does all the work) is
publicly named "lists" (which is outdated, since we don't call them
"lists" anymore if we can help it), but its True Name is firebird (as in
both Stravinsky and Pontiac).  A "wirebird" is a type of plover, so my
machine is named "plover," even though it's not specific to Wirebird
versus Phoenyx or anything.  And Carl's machine is raven, which has been a
recurring theme in the cRAVENs household.

(Hey Carl, can we rename lists/firebird during the upgrade, or would that
be a really bad time to do it?)

TH>I thought it was only British ISPs that gave strange names to servers;
TH>BT Internet's servers are all radioactive metals with half-lives in
TH>nanoseconds - reflecting the length of time the servers stay up,
TH>perhaps?

SouthWind's Unix machines (the ones that ran the ISP itself) were named
after [semi-]precious stones (onyx, opal, jade, etc.) while its Windows
machines (the ones that ran the back office, accounting, etc.) were named
after non-precious rock-type stuff (rock, dirt, sand, etc.)  All were
(initially, until they got too many servers) four letters. The onyx/dirt
dichotomy was reflecting the relative value placed on the machines... I'm
not sure what the four-letter part was supposed to imply...

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