dctrud observes that in corporate/professional environments with lots and lots of machines (whether virtual or physical) host names tend to follow the “cattle, not pets” convention. So you’ll see hostnames like “ws-win10-000001”, “ws-win10-000002”, “srv-freebsd-000666” etc.
With the migration of much hosting to cloud services, anonymous VMs, and container hosts that are treated like ‘cattle not pets’, it’s rarer to see fun naming schemes for servers in organizations. I think, if I remember correctly, that when I was at University studying computer science all the *nix servers (for mail, shell, assignment submission, web pages etc.) were named after cartoon cats. I doubt they are any more. People with home labs, or just a laptop and Raspberry Pi, are more likely to still name them in fun ways. I wonder what everyone is using for computer names?
I remember working at one shop where the sysadmin used character named from Final Fantasy IV in their naming scheme. Workstations got named after characters who joined your party:
- Cecil
- Kain
- Rosa
- Rydia
- Edge
Internal servers got named after summoned monsters:
- Titan
- Ifrit
- Shiva
- Ramuh
Servers exposed to the internet got named after villains:
- Scarmiglione
- Cagnazzo
- Barbariccia
- Rubicante
- Golbeza
It worked reasonably well as long as people were careful when referring to particular machines. Saying things like, “Rosa’s acting up again; I need to give it a boot up the ass,” or “Gotta hit Golbeza upside the head again,” could easily offend and lead to complaints concerning hostile environments.
Of course, if you hire somebody named Cecil or Rosa, and you’re also using those names as hostnames, it’s bound to confuse somebody eventually. This is probably why professional environments tend to use a “cattle, not pets” approach.
Things are different at home, though. My wife isn’t going to accuse me of creating a “hostile environment” if I say I’ve got to give the router a kick up the ass. Hell, she’s more likely to suggest exactly that herself if it’s acting up.
At home, I tend to pull my hostnames from Kabbalah.
- My desktop PC: kether
- My laptop: malkuth
- My router: gevurah
- My wife’s desktop PC: binah
- My wife’s laptop: tiphareth
- Guest computer: netzach
- PS4: hod
- NAS: yesod
Furthermore, the setting for my Starbreaker saga includes friendly general AI daemons. The first ten, which were developed by and continue to serve an organization called the Phoenix Society, are collectively named the Sephiroth. Malkuth is the most prominent of them, but the others sometimes show up as well.