If you're lucky enough to be in charge of naming a whole series of machines, perhaps on a house network or a WAN at work, what are some of the more interesting naming schemes you've come up with? How did you choose the names?

If you haven't gotten to name machines yourself, what are some of the more interesting machine names you've seen or heard about, along with the stories behind them.

I once knew a machine called phoenix - rumor had it this was because it kept crashing and rising from the ashes. Later the Powers That Be added machines called tuscon and flagstaff, though, and the story was lost.

-- Jen Kitchen (jen@eclipse.net), October 21, 1999

Answers

All our machines are named after places in Northumberland. Hence catless. I also had a machine called tiptoe at one time. There are some great local names!

There is a collection of 5 machines that run a webcache called after the spice girls.

L.

-- Lindsay Marshall (Lindsay.Marshall@ncl.ac.uk), October 22, 1999.

The Mac lab at my college had LaserWriters named for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence.

The ImageWriters in the same lab were named for the Jetsons: George, Jane, Elroy, Judy, and Astro.

A newspaper I once worked for had a pair of pre-press workstations named Tracy and Hepburn.

-- Jesse James Garrett (jjg@jjg.net), October 22, 1999.

We had an Apollo ring at the U of Michigan named after local Ann Arbor bars and restaurants - "delrio", "fleetwood", and the machine on my desk "starbarlounge". My PC was "bluefront" after a local party store.

Ed

-- Edward Vielmetti (emv@vacuum.mi.org), October 23, 1999.

I've always wanted to name a roomful of machines after wine grapes: cabernet, pinot noir, riesling, baco noir, petite syrah, and so on (Not chardonnay, though, I'm not too crazy about chardonnay -- probably just because there's too much of it..) But, I got a machine last month and had to give it a name, and since I couldn't decide what my favorite grape was... and I was in a hurry to get the thing configured and working, I named it Xena. ;-)

Cheers..

-- Lynette Millett (millett@io.com), October 23, 1999.

At my employer, the machines at the server farm are named for Hindu divinities. The other machines have names drawn from an ancient hardbacked copy of the Advanced D&D Monster Manual.

At my old job, I tried to start a pattern of naming machines after the black cats each member of the staff had (we seemed to have several black cats between us) but it never took hold.

I did convince them to name an NT server "evilempi

-- Bill Humphries (bill@whump.com), October 25, 1999.