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).

At work I’ve named a few machines, notably surf (a webserver); soot (a glossy-white ibook); safe (a secure webserver).

Used

konishi

Konishi is my desktop computer. I’ve actually broken the golden rule above with this one. From October 2004 until roughly October 2005, konishi was my desktop 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. You can read about getting Linux working nicely on this hardware.

Other Egan-derived names

• teranesia – taken from the novel of the same name. This is my sparcstation .
• qusp – my laptop computer. Taken from a short story called Singleton, a Qusp is a quantum-device used to collapse the quantum waveform in the brain (or something).

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).

Free

• Carter-Zimmerman (C-Z) polis
• yatima – protagonist from Diaspora, means orphan in Swahili
• 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.