Ask HN: How do you name your servers?

In college: beer names (i.e. shiner-bock) At first job: characters from 'The Simpsons' Later on at first job: elements (i.e. Fluoride) At current gig: something amenable to Chef like component-worker-01.environment01.foo.employer.com

Did you used original French names (Tintin, Milou, Haddock, Tournesol, Dupont & Dupond) or English ones (Tintin, Snowy, Haddock, Calculus, Thomson & Thompson)?

Snakes here: mamba, taipan, rattlesnake and viper so far.

At work we use British fighter jets. Unfortunately, unlike the US, the British have pretty lame fighter jet names ('puffin', for example).

Just pick something with a lot of cool sounding names - makes announcing server changes way more badass.

Paul, MuadDib and Usul?

For anything serious I'd go with a numbering scheme, see [1] for examples and ideas. If it has to be names, the elements of the periodic system seem to be somewhat popular, see [2] for more lists.

Apart from that: I named my second computer[3] after a character from a book I was reading at the time. I didn't yet know it was the villain when I chose the name, so the name was not what I intended it to be. I stuck with the convention anyway.

It's always from a book I am currently reading or I have read recently and most of the time I choose the villains. Because virtual machines need names as well and I create them faster than I can read books I allowed characters from movies for anything virtual.

The nice thing about it is that it connects the machines to a period of my life (when I was reading a certain book or seeing a movie for the first time).

    [1] http://serverfault.com/questions/17274/
    [2] http://namingschemes.com/
    [3] My first computer was a C64 and had no name, other than C64:-)