@datarama mathematical structures and symbols. Monoid, delta, epsilon, stuff like that.

As for myself:

Probably unsurprisingly, I used to use genera of lizards: tiliqua, japalura, corucia, varanus, etc. But then I realized I wanted to use those for my fonts.

For the last ten years or so I've used mathematicians: euclid, moebius, noether, erdos, etc.

@datarama Bumblebee families. Currently in use is Bombias, Melanobombus and Subterraneobombus. That last one is actually a reused name. Previous names included Confusibombus, Megalobombus, Thoracobombus and … Psithyrus? I’d have to check my blog for more. 😅

@datarama I used to guve them names from Tolkien's world of Lord of the Rings, but then BigTech showed up, and I was "nah", switched to Pratchett's worlds. But while I love those stories, the naming options are more limited than in Tolkien's case.

The current plan is to use latin plant names going forward. That has the advantage of involving my wife, and I get to learn a lot of plant facts & history, and our kids enjoy this process too.

@datarama all my machines are named after songs of the band "dredg"

@datarama I’ve been giving them names of places in Raymond E. Feist’s books for quite a while.

@datarama pokemon, semi-related to their function
drowzee is the laptop - that sleeps
delibird is the ADS-B receiver - birds
chansey is the media server - carries an egg/valuable stuff or something

others just don't get special names like the home assistant Pi that's just the home assistant pi

@datarama

The Children of Nyx:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Children_of_Nyx

It's awesome, and I am awesome for using it.

@datarama For my servers, stars for physical machines and planets for virtual ones. (Since, well, planets orbit stars and there are usually multiple planets per star :P.)

For desktopy machines I like to use amusing-sounding (to me) village names. It's just harder to take Ytterhogdal too seriously than "the work laptop". (Though it's far from consistent. I'm posting this from Utgård since it's, well, the laptop for taking to the unknown outsides. And my main desktop is named Emeritus because the old name referenced my deadname.)

My private naming scheme is characters in childrens books by the Danish author Ole Lund Kirkegaard (usually short, slightly quirky, and unusual). I have started running out, so I have been adding - recently - nicknames of characters in PG Wodehouse's Jeeves books.

Currently:

virgil (home server)
tullinup (laptop)
clara (VPS, for DNS and backup mx)
anton (VPS, for DNS and backup mx)
kullekarlen (jukebox)
irene (phone)
corky (pc, PG Wodehouse)

Previously:

sille
karlemil
flora
topper
otto
læris
mads
gnalle
hodja
elfaza
vita
konggulerod
irenetv
frkravn

At work: farm animals (in Danish), and generalizing to other animals: Fish schools for servers for an application (fish size related to role/server size), zebras as a herd of cluster nodes, rodents for a specific purpose, pigs for a certain project, etc.

For both purposes I like to make lists of potential names in advance, as it might be hard to come up with a good name fitting both machine and purpose on the spot - it is nice to have a list to go through.

At work it's a wiki page, at home two text files.

(The concept of "cattle not pets" has reached my work place - I'm not thoroughly convinced that boring names are better, it's not like you have to treat the servers differently just because they have a fun name that makes it easier to remember what it is and what it does, also you are allowed to add aliases that describe the function in addition to the hostname, which also makes it easier to change the purpose of a machine, or move the service...)

@datarama I've used planets, Star Wars planets, trees, and the first time, different names for "book". Book, folio, librum, etc. Since I was naming disks, I had to skip "volume". 😉

@datarama Mine are all vampires. At the moment, these are amelia, spike, mhari, eli, gris, tycho, carmilla and laszlo.

@datarama "Fun" names are enjoyable, but do not scale. At some point, a functional, deterministic, and hierarchical naming system is the only appropriate option.

@datarama One place I worked at liked to do this, and we tried a few different "themes" (Star Trek, Comics, etc.) Partly difficult because we wanted the names to match the function. The best match we found was Sesame Street. The web server was "cookiemonster", the federated database machines were "bert" and "ernie", etc. No one really liked it, but it fit our machine functions, so we used that.

Now I use boring names: DC-01, DC-02, WSUS-01, WKS-22, SRV-05, etc.

@datarama local species. My "new" PC is squirrel (an acorn of RAM stored for the winter), my mini PC server is bees. My college used species of trees, because of its connection to an arboretum, and I wanted something similar.

@datarama Star Wars Planets, Ship, Tech. It depends on what type of device best suits its name from Star Wars. :) Dehumidifier? GX-8-<location>.fqdn

@datarama My computers are Magic the Gathering dragons: right now I have Niv-Mizzet and Palladia-Mors.

@datarama my friends group used to name machines with song names (wicked, adidas, firestarter) but these days I tend to lean more toward characters from games (katsumi, varric) or descriptors (slate, silky)

@datarama I do fictional robots, trying to roughly match vibes

@datarama The most obscure characters from the Matter of Britain that I can find.

Also, my bikes are included in the naming scheme.

@datarama I don't have a naming scheme per-se, but every full-blown computer I've had as an adult has had a name. They're typically ad-hoc though

my current laptop is “Shadowbloom" after a track I wrote shortly before getting it and that it's a dark variant of the macbook pro series

my previous intel desktop tower that is now my NAS is “NumberNine" after both the i9 chip and that it's my ninth named computer; it's retained the name across multiple OS installs

the computer I had before those was “LoftyTannat” after both the loft apartment my partner and I had just moved into and the wine popular in Uruguay, where we had just returned from living for a few months

The Macbook Air I had purchased while dating my now-partner was “RainbowVomit”

That's as far back as my backups go, I don't really remember the older names

@datarama Literary characters, for 25+ years, but I lately I also started using musicians.

@datarama proper names of stars: I'm typing this on canopus, currently I also have procyon, spica, proxima, sirius, and aldebaran. polaris and regulus are retired.

@datarama I love answering this question! 😁
My computers are all named after Venture Bros characters.

Servers or server-like machines:
Vendata
Venturion
Quizboy
Galacticon
GhostRobot
Zer0
MUTHER

Laptops/Desktops/etc:
StCloud
Sovereign
SgtHatred
Killinger

@datarama Pokemon! It needs to match the color of the case. For example, my Raspberry Pi in an aluminum Flirc case with black trim is Silvally.

Makes it so much easier, although I'm quickly working through black Pokemon for the generic slabs of glass that are modern phones.

@datarama
LOL. I just "name" them the manufacturer model names. 😆

@datarama horsemen of the apocalypse: war, pestilence, famine, death

@datarama Big trees for servers and flowers for clients on a CS network in the 90's. Beech and Oak did the heavy lifting.

@datarama I name all of mine after Pokémon, loosely selecting by the device’s purpose or appearance.

E.g. iPhone is Dratini, iPad is Dragonair, MacBook is Dragonite, my NAS is Arceus, my Switch is Porygon…

@datarama home systems are named after the houses of Dragaera. Work systems are physicists. Cloud systems are named after computer scientists, drawn from the country the VM lives in.

@datarama wow, context is important here

Home/self hosting: lewis carroll stuff
Glass, Jabberwock, Queen, Sheep

Work laptop/desktop: chaos synonym
Anarchy, chaos, bedlam, turmoil

Internal servers: let others pick and roll with it
cereals, native American peoples, cities in ancient Rome

Build machines: Marshall Islands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Islands#/media/File:MH_-map_A.png

@datarama my computers are fictional Jack's last names, vaguely trying to fit their "personality".

@datarama

My PCR machines are named after minions and at one point had little printouts of their namesakes on them.

This was not my doing, but I thought it was fun. Also a great way to identify issues with PCRs...sadly a piece of Carl's lid snapped off and PCRs failed in him so we sent him to dispo--after holding onto him for 5 years as one does in labs.

@datarama So bored that my workplace used Norse mythology (Thor, Loki, yawn), I suggested Mexican mythology: Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, Xiuhtecuhtli, now SSHing is interesting. Buncha racists, they wouldn't even consider it.

@datarama It answers to "Laptop" pretty well.

@datarama Elements. Their IP addresses end in their atomic weights.

@datarama

I have more than one theme, but the most recent is flowers - Primrose, Poppy and Bluebell. My earbuds are also a flower, Hyacinth - because ‘She sings at me’ ( like Hyacinth Bucket - err… Bouquet.)

I have an old iPad mounted in the kitchen called Alice - cuz she’s always in the kitchen.

I used to have two workstations named for Rugrats characters- Spike and Reptar, and I named my servers after Colorado 14ers.

@datarama cheeses. Current one is gorgonzola

@datarama @SRLevine At some point circa 2010 I started naming my devices after Roman goddesses, in no particular order, though my backup drive is often Mnemosyne (goddess of memory)

@datarama All my devices are named after things in The Murderbot Diaries.

My phone is CodeBundle.FuckThisToo
My laptop is AdaCol2
My ChromeCast is TargetControlSystem

(The name of the ChromeCast is a slight dig against Google/also a bit punny because it controls the TV but in an antagonist way)

@datarama

Small machines get function names. Servers get names from Ziggy Stardust era Bowie. My public web server is weird, my internal server is gilly, and my Sun-3/280 is detroit.

@datarama

Work servers are (mostly) video game characters, with the character being some sort of mnemonic for info about the server. Mario is misc-prod, Luigi is misc-staging. Thwomp is the one with a big ol slab of a hard drive for archives. Sonic is the one with a fast CPU for big CI jobs. (Chatty) Cathy isn't a video game character, but handles our XMPP and Jitsi chat.

Personal computers are generally have boring names because they tend to be more general-purpose and so don't have much character for me to go off of at naming-time. "lukeshu-{model}" for prebuilts (laptops, SBCs, phones, and such), and -something-about-the-build otherwise; "lukeshu-build64" was my first 64-bit build back in the day, "monolith" is a big featurless black tower (2001 A Space Odyssey). I had a laptop that was the guts of one model in the exterior of another model, it was lukeshu-arla, because Arla was a skinwalker in a TV show (Haven?).

@datarama Characters from Futurama. My current machine is Barbados Slim.

@datarama I originally had few devices when starting out on Linux, so I named them after they what they actually were: Laptop, Desktop, Netbook.

Eventually, like many here, I started hoarding too many old devices that family members didn't want anymore and this scheme started having collisions, so I had to adapt. Nowadays I just give them funny names that I would give to cartoon characters: a thick laptop from 2010 with celeron became "chunkyboi," my first NUC "nuclear," when I tried Alpine Linux, I named it "pinester." Debian Sid became "debster," FreeBSD was "freebo." I named my first Thinkpad "teefour" (I guess I wanted to give it a Terminator-sounding name or something)

As I distrohop casually, I can come up with these funny names every now and then, and sometimes "revive" the same machine under different OSes. In those cases, I add a "revenge" or "reloaded" clause ex: "pinesters-revenge."

The one constant thing is the network-attached Pi: always called "flyingtoaster"

@datarama I name all my devices "MemeMachine" though have been thinking about changing my PC's name to Brain Box

@datarama servers from LOTR, lesser stuff using Star Trek names.

@datarama in the mid-to-late 2000's I managed the machines for an ecommerce startup.

My naming scheme was volcanoes.

Because they would rumble and shake and occasionally explode.

And it let me call the monitoring server seismograph (underlying machine name was erebus).

Good times. I was criminally underpaid and the experience wrecked my mental and physical health for some time after.

@datarama first names somewhat similar to the OS the machine is running:
- Fred (Fedora)
- Deborah (Debian)
- ...

@datarama
For simplicity's sake I've ended up doing
[Owner][type][order number]
E.g. KerstinHeadphones3

My partner otoh doesn't even save the number of the building's door bell phone.

@datarama Mine are named after British islands. Scottish islands for general purpose computers (my main PC is Mull, laptop is Yell). English islands for single purpose computers (I used to have a TV and DVR called Agnes and Gugh, which are a pair of tied islands in Scilly). Welsh islands for network infrastructure.

I used to name them after characters from the original Deus Ex, and my WiFi is still named after the Aquinas network from the game

@datarama my username is hellocatfood and all of my working computers are named based on their physical and hard drive size. So my 256gb 13 inch laptop is tiny computerfood, 512gb is mediumcomputerfood etc

Raspberry Pi's are pifood, earphones are earfood... you get the idea

@datarama Lovecraftian things; current workstation is rlyeh, previous was yuggoth, working on putting together nephren-ka.

@datarama My Macs have names from the Battle Angel Alita manga, ThinkPads/workstations have volcano related names, servers have geological formation names, switches/routers have squid/octopus species names and APs are named after objects that cover/shelter you. Work stuff has boring but functional names and numbers.

@datarama Demons: Behemoth, Leviathan, and Damian (my phone)

@datarama characters from UNSONG. The server is tharmas, the laptops sohu (pinebook) and nathanda (Framework), the desktop uriel, the NAS thamiel, rPI ithaca and phone malia. I also still have edge from when I named them after Asimov's novels

@datarama

Characters from The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and the Vicomte de Bragelonne.

@datarama Named around things you throw away: Garbage, Litter, Trash, Vacuum (Acer Aspire, which in French sounds like a vacuum cleaner), and probably more that I forgot.

Yes I'm serious.

@datarama Tuna species. I considered switching to names of cheeses some years ago, when I started reusing names.

@datarama for physical computers I use Neuromancer character names. This is armitage, laptop is molly, small workstation hideo, julius/dixie/maelcum are servers...

(Non-physical [to me] computers get location [h1, nc1 for servers on Hetzner and Netcup] or function names [nextcloud, pg, etc.].)

@datarama At one point ours were named after Pratchett characters. With the mail server being Moist (as in von Lipwig).

But the scheme is now more disparate characters from British comedy and/or greek mythology (the mail server is now Hermes, but the dev server is Eric (as in The Viking, or the Half-a-Bee).

@datarama my work laptop is called peanuthamper, and a raspberry pi I use as a server is called badgey. Both names from Star Trek Lower Decks. I'm waiting for them to turn on me.

@datarama old Egyptian gods, Greek and Latin writers and philosophers

@datarama characters from the Borribles. Flinthead, Stonks, Oricocco, Torreycannon etc. hard drive volumes/networks get named after parts of London mentioned in the books

@datarama I was about to tell you and realised it would be too hard to explain. They are vaguely raven related. Vaguely.

Mr Bait's machines are all named after things to do with otters.

@datarama @GinevraCat Rocks, basically. Laptop is geode, mac mini is pebble. My iPad used to be opal but now I have a black one so it’s onyx. Had a cloud server I called okenite because, well, look at it.

@datarama

grep “ine$” /usr/share/dict/linux.words | sort –random-sort | tail

basically any name ending in "ine"

cafeine
cocaine
aspirine
fivenine
...

@datarama Thunderbirds characters and machines. And my local domain is "tracy.island". The laptop that travels about is "penelope". The most powerful machine is "brains".

@datarama

Names related with novels or movies (characters, places,...) in the form of a sequence.

It started during my PhD: my group had a computer name scheme which I understood was Old Testament characters. I was reading #MobyDick. I asked the IT officer if #Ahab qualified, featured in both.

after it had travelled its hectic way to after-sales and "disappeared" for a while, I named my personal laptop #Gulliver ...and as a postdoc, name scheme was birds, and I was allotted... #Swift !

@datarama
Only 2 computers in that scheme, but: a mix of 2 words from fictions I enjoy. Current is "Entinium" after the Ents from LOtR and the Antinium from TW
Previous one was "Impalardis", named after 2 TV series that were popular around 2012.

@datarama device1, device2, ...

@datarama scientists, fictitious scientists for virtual machines

So I am on franklin right now, newton is down the stairs.

@datarama I name them after space probes: Huygens, Cassini, voyager, pioneer etc.

@datarama fleet hostnames -

Gaming pc: LPCv7
(for Large Pixel Collider - it gets a version increment when it gets a permanent hardware update)

8" convertible laptop: frisbee

14" laptop: bigfrisbee

mini pc connected to my tv: couchbait

@datarama i sent through all the answers and amazingly, nobody seems to be using famous fictional computers names ; that's what i use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_computers

@datarama often dead mathemticians. Riemann, Gauss, Noether at one point. I've also got a tweedledee/dumb combination. A variety of different names too.

Oh wow, this thread really escaped containment.

I enjoy reading this. :-)