Over the last five years, I've encountered a surprising variety of server naming schemes... a handful are extremely common (South Park, Simpsons, planets, cars) but there have been some very interesting themes:
- Mountains (Rushmore, Hood, K2, Adams, McKinley...)
- Presidents
- Muppets (Beaker, Dr Teeth, Statler and Waldorf [db cluster]...)
- Disasters (Tsumani, Andrew, Rita...)
- Zodiac
- Grateful Dead songs (Sugar Magnolia, Tennessee Jed, Ramblin Rose...)
- Local Breweries (Steelhead, Full Sail, Rogue...)
- ATF (AK-47, Moonshine, JimBeam...)
- Norse Pantheon (Odin, Thor, Loki...)
Sadly, clever themes are dying out as data centers scale up... the result is that the 'old-school' core systems maintain their personalities but new server/desktop builds have a derived hostname (userid, core function, platform, etc).
This really is an unfortunate loss, since (similar to conference room names) you can learn a lot about the company culture by the way they identify their resources.
