At home: planets and moons from Firefly, the domain being "cortex". The primary PC is "Serenity".

I'm interested in making films, so my machines are all named after film studios. British film studios are where the main work takes place, American ones are usually virtual and have short lifespans.

I've used (or, seen used ...) : (Seven) Dwarves, (Tolkein) Dwarves and Elves, Peanuts characters, Cities, and numbers.

Hi, seeing my pseudonym and signature you will instantly know what I use for my host names. Being a huge fan of Tolkien, my laptop is MiddleEarth, and the other machines I administer are TheShire, Rivendell and Moria.

I use a mix of names from different sources, but most are variants of old Heathkit Amateur Radio stuff. For instance, I had a HW-80 transceiver, so one of my machines in hotwater80

I go after the old Ubuntu default hostname scheme and call them <username>-desktop, <username>-laptop, etc. (the new scheme where they put the model number of your computer in the default hostname makes the hostnames look messy). I've also gone a bit further and used <username>-server for a temporary local server and <username>-client when I set up a thin client system for someone on the local network.

I don't know what happens when I get a second desktop/laptop though...

At a previous place of employment, we named our routers and switches "Ryobi", "Black and Decker", "Makita","Bosch",
"Craftsman", "Porter-Cable", etc. Any name that might show up on a woodworker's router.
A set of scratch disks (which we tried to track, because sometimes we backed up to them) got more obscure names: "Blue Ox", "Mildred", "Didrikson", "Zaharias", "George", "Herman", "Ruth", "Pig in the City", "Sonny", "Cher", and "Miss August".
Each, of course, is a babe.

A friend liked the idea of using names of carnivores, but there's so MANY... an alternative was just
to use the names of weasels: "weasel", "stoat", "ermine", "mink", "polecat", "ferret", and a case can be made
for "badger", "otter", "wolverine"...

Keeping machine histories in a database, it's easy to search for a name or serial number. The best naming
scheme would not get spurious hits on a string search, so off-the-wall names with no other local referent
are optimal. Names need to be memorable, serial numbers unique...

I'm obviously a seriously sad person - I use names of Harry Potter characters. Currently running Harry, Hermione and Albus in the Netherlands and Severus in the UK. Mostly Linux Mint on seriously old hardware (Athlon XP or Pentium 4). Just got a quad-core HP workstation (second-hand, like most of my kit). Came with Windoze Vista (|-(). I should probably give it two different flavours of GNU-Linux, e.g. Mint and Kubuntu, and name them Fred and George!

All of my computers are named after female sf and/or fantasy characters.

You know, I don't think that's sad in any way -- J. K. Rowling wrote a series of books for kids, each increasingly with language and theme becoming more serious and age-appropriate and millions of kids were standing around in book store parking lots at midnight reading their brand-new treasure.

My sister gave me the first two volumes for Christmas one year, I read 'em, I was truly impressed and I bought every single one of the rest of the series as they came out (not at midnight at the book store, pre-order at Amazon). Read 'em all, bought the entire set for my grand nieces (they read 'em all), enjoyed every single one.

Nothing sad about that.

I wholeheartedly agree! I've never read a Harry Potter book myself, but I'm always reading something and have all my life. I've heard nothing but good things about the Potter series, and if it gets millions of people to enjoy reading, it has to be a great thing!
Hold your head up, you're not living a sad life at all!

Well... :-) something NOT good is that the "magic" is random (it made no sense). And for a school to not have an organized approach to a subject is rather odd. Arbitrary use of words/phrases... but then there are brooms without such, other things with just arm waving... It boils down into "memorize this and you are done".

Granted, a lot of elementary school is that (whether it should be or not), but middle/high school should not.

Another thing that bothered me was that if Harry was so gifted, then he should have torn through the text books and the library - and then been able to surpass everyone in class. He would have been familiar with all the topics, possibly even more than Ron who grew up in the environment.

Defeat an instructor in the first year? nope - no sense at all, Voldemort should have killed him off at the first chance; there was no need to even touch him (just drop a rock on him).

A lot of the activity given made no sense. Using a broom can't be tracked... but teleportation can? Underage use of magic can be tracked... yet they couldn't track the use of a broom by underage wizards? Snape couldn't identify who was stealing from his supplies? (granted, that one could be counted as a nitpick).

Really good fantasy has an underlying organization - even though it may not be directly described, it is present. The books are a fun read (when you ignore the inconsistencies).

Help when managing with puppet:

Naming convention: ProjLayer##-Role##
................................^..^...^.^.^...^
.................................|..|... |. |. |... |
.................................|..|... |. |. |... A 2 digit number. This is for clustered servers, but all servers should have this number.
.................................|..|... |. |. |
.................................|..|... |. |. Part of technology stack. EG: "ws" for Web Server; "db" for Database server; "auth" for ldap server
.................................|..|... |. |
.................................|..|... |. A dash as separator (not underscore)
.................................|..|... |
.................................|..|... Optional "sequence" number. To accommodate 'dev01', dev02, etc.
.................................|..|
.................................|...Application layer. This is a Puppet term for what we normally talk about at the "Environment." EG: dev;qa;prd
.................................|
.................................|
.................................|
.................................Project. Something like the application name. Usually abbreviated to 3 to 5 letters

Every schema is arbitrary as some level, but (I hope) this design help new guys and outsiders know intuitively *something* about the server.

I'm pretty boring. My hostnames are always $distro-$devicetype. Some examples to better illustrate what I mean: ubuntu-desktop, fedora-lappy, debian-pi, and so on.

These aren't exactly hostnames, but I use two different schemes for naming my planets in Starfleet Commander universes:

1st universe is SciFi-author based with numbers for galaxys: Clark1, Ellison2, Asimov3, Heinlein4, Crichton5, Adams6, Herbert7, Burroughs8, & Vonnegut9.

2nd uni is names of dwarf planets with similar numbers: Haumea1, Kepler2, Eris3, Ceres3, Gliese4, Pluto4, Koi5, & Wolf5