Sigh, the two oldes systems at my (current) company (mainframes actually) are called Yoda and Vega. Then we moved to very arbitrary names like xyzapp201 (xyz being company name), and xyzVTapp201 for virtual systems. of course no one could tell you what exactly application was on app201. Now they're a little better about naming them after the system (xyzSQL05 is a sql server boxen), but - and get this - you only get 3 characters for your app name, because - according to our server guys - the maximum length of a host name is *8* characters.... Err... wha? And believe it or not, this apparently is being caused by the linux (RH) servers we're starting to buy. I have long since given up on arguing with them on it.

I've worked on enterprise asset management systems in a number of different industries including electrical utilities, natural gas pipelines, and military. In almost every company they've had some variant of an "abandoned in place" asset status. In cases like power plants, trying to remove a single cable from a series of cable trays or raceways is rarely, if ever, worth the effort and risk. Some cable trays have dozens of cables (and I'm not talking cat5) in them, sometimes half of which are "dead" but removing those from the middle of a stack of hot cables in a working power plant doesn't have much of an ROI.