Names, and Naming Conventions

Any sysadmin has a naming convention for the systems under their purview. With the need to refer to a specific system, the names may be purely functional, but being the eccentric sort, sysadmins try to give them more memorable names wherever possible, if for no other reason that 'chomp' and 'chewy' sound better than 'corpdb1' and 'corpdb2'.

My own naming convention has evolved remarkably little over the years. I firmly believe that names need to be earned, by function or by quirk, but a loose framework for said names helps a great deal.

The first system I ever named was pizzahut. As I went (and still go) by the handle pizza, it was a natural name for a server that intended to be my private playground and storage space. Many hardware reincarnations later, pizzahut still lives, dutifully serving away as the digital heart of my house.

shaft was the second, coming along three months later as a shell, www, and dns server for other people's use. It too still lives, many hardware reincarnations later, and is more important than ever. It served you this page!

lunchbox was my workstation at one of my student jobs. Food to go, eh? It too has gone through many iterations, the name following me through various computers at various employers.

issues was the name of my workstation at home; it was well named. I eventually sold it to my sister and bought a laptop instead.

crapper was set up in the bathroom for use on the toilet. It didn't last long, mainly because the hardware was so under powered and by the time it finished booting (off of a floppy!), you were probably done anyway. And the whole thing was a one-up type joke.

spank came along as a backup DNS/mail server for shaft, and still lives, doing next to nothing but doing it quite well. Except when hurricane comes through and drowns its internet connection.

teavee was an experiment with a TV tuner, originally living in the kitchen. The first iteration of this died due to truly flaky hardware, but the name was re-used after I moved to Florida and gave it newer hardware. That didn't last long either... within a week, one of the hard disks blew, and the machine was rechristened...

burnt, in honor of the scorch marks left on the case from the aforementioned hard drive. It also finally brought the naming convention back to the food/pizza-related motif that continues to this day. Burnt's now on its third iteration of old flaky hardware, and acts as my home entertainment center.

baked and half-baked were two names for the same box, a Sun Ultra 2 workstation that I got for practically nothing just before I moved to Florida. Originally called half-baked because one of the CPU modules was dead, it was promoted to fully baked once the repairs was made. That machine never did much besides put out a lot of noise and heat, though it did briefly act as a router, owing to its NINE Ethernet ports. Yowza.

handtossed is my wireless access point. All of those bits being flung into the air.. makes me kind of hungry.

digorno is my SLIMP3 music player. Named in honor of the "It's not delivery, it's Digorno!" advertisements, this device "delivers" music, only it doesn't. Eh, it's an inside joke. And still pizza-related!

heatwave is my old laptop. Actually, several of them. The first one I bought had a bit of an overheating problem, so the name seemed appropriate. The next two reused the name but didn't have heat problems, but the last one... earned the name back, and then some. I still have it, and have to keep a fan sucking air out of the vents in order to keep it from dying. I'll probably be promoting this machine to be my "new" entertainment center, as it's a lot more powerful than burnt, and even with an external fan, much quieter.

And finally, marinara is my current laptop. It was a tossup between 'sun-dried', 'hawaiian' and 'marinara', because its black with an orange-red trim that looks like marinara sauce left out a bit too long, sun-dried tomatoes, and a stereotypical Hawaiian sunset. I'd have reused the name heatwave, except I still have the old laptop.

So there you have it, names. And all of this said, I haven't figured out what to call the new box yet. 'stuffed' is my current favorite.