It's important to have a good naming scheme for machines, if you are going to have to work with quite a lot of them. I think I have a reasonably good knack for choosing names individually, but I'm not so good at choosing good sources of names. At present I use names from the novels of Greg Egan for my personal machines.
I also think that you should never change the name of a machine, or re-use a name. This gets a bit tricky when you upgrade bits and pieces, at what point is it a different machine? My rule of thumb is to bind names to the CPU. (This might prove harder if I start dealing with lots of SMP machines).
Used
konishi
Konishi was my desktop computer from about 2004 to 2008. I've actually broken
the golden rule above with this one. From October 2004 until roughly October
2005, konishi was one machine which unfortunately broke. I was eventually
given a courtesy replacement from the manufacturer (medion) and I kept the
name.
The name is taken from Konishi Polis, a computer "metropolis" in the novel Diaspora.
The machine is a Medion MD8383XL.
Other Egan-derived names
- teranesia - taken from the novel of the same name. This was my
sparcstation.
- qusp - my laptop. Taken from a short story called
Singleton, a Qusp is a quantum-device used to collapse the quantum
waveform in the brain (or something).
- yatima - my Thecus ?hardware/n2100 NAS server. A protagonist from
Diaspora, the name is Swahili for "orphan".
Other
- limey - my first ever desktop computer, purchased in 1998 or 1999 second-hand, virtually entirely upgraded peacemeal until 2004. So called because I am british.
- ice - a pentium 200 machine that served as my webserver from roughly 2000 until 2004. Named as a counterpart to my former web host, a machine called 'fire' (belonging to Tom).
- prefect - given to my Nokia n800. So called because the
device reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Free
- Carter-Zimmerman (C-Z) polis
- Gleisner - The name given to a corporation who make robots. I think this is merely a surname.
- polis - greek for a city, or a city-state.