Server naming

It’s long been a tradition in the UNIX world to name one’s servers. I’ve named mine many things over the years:

• Garuda – not after the Hindu god but for the callsign used by the Navy anti-submarine warfare planes at North Island NAS in Coronado, CA. I like the way the word rolls off the tongue.
• Armstrong – after Lance, of course
• Mercury – a mailserver, duh
• Stymie – a firewall. My all-time favorite name for a server.
• Silas – a fileserver named after the legendary waiter at the now-defunct Don Murray’s Barbecue
• Madison – after the President and Founding Father I guess I was feeling patriotic at the time.
• Eddy – One of my NeuseMedia servers. Since Neuse is a river I picked eddy.

Weather Predict’s servers were named after tremendous weather phenomena, like “Delrecho,” for instance. Delrecho is a violent straight-line windstorm. My puny laptop was no match for their number-crunching Linux clusters so I couldn’t help but name my laptop Drizzle. Oddly enough no one got the joke.

At NetApp I dubbed my laptop Sundowner. This one had a double meaning. I was on a Gordon Lightfoot kick at the time, but also because I often felt trapped in my cubicle and wanted nothing more than the work day to end. The groups who use the huge datacenter at NetApp all have their own naming conventions: hot sauces (that was a HAHT Software thing, too), serial killers. You name it. Some of them were pretty clever.

Now I’m working remotely and life is good. In fact, it’s better than ever. This time around I named my laptop Marquesas, after the South Pacific Islands named in the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song Southern Cross. This isn’t because I wish I was somewhere other than here, it’s more of a reflection of my dreams. Sailing to the Marquesas is on my bucket list, you know, and I want to keep in mind that one day I will get there.

So there’s your little dose of geekdom for today!