Jody,

Everywhere I've worked (except my current employer, AFAICT) has had a
system for naming servers internally (for reference to the machine in
particular) and vhosts for the services themselves.

When I worked at Tennessee (at the time, a strict Sun shop), all the
servers were named after sun worshipping peoples.  The development
servers were named after MST3K notables.

At Emory, the servers had inconsistent themes:  some were chemists,
some were mythical spider creatures. If I set up development a
machine, it was always named after a Godzilla character.

At Tech there seems to be no rhyme or reason to our hostnames and,
like Dan laments, we have some servers named with products for
hostnames:  "Illiad", "Eres", etc. (sigh).

I don't have any control over my development server names, here,
either -- no system.

Rob Casson told me that all the servers at Miami of Ohio are named
after Sherlock Holmes characters.

Personally, I find it helpful to have an internal name and public name
to abstract the service from the "hardware".  I imagine that might
vary from person to person, though.

-Ross.

On 10/26/06, Jody Fagan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Code4Lib folks,
>
> I'd like to write an anecdotal article about library server nomenclature
> ... I'm for-sure that most librarians don't even know our servers have
> names. I am hoping that some of you might be willing to share (off-list)
> server names you have known in libraries, how/why you chose them, and
> any random thoughts you have about them. Did you inherit them? Did you
> get to pick them out? Do you think the whole idea of server names is
> silly or do you secretly like the fact that your servers have names?
> I am happy to guarantee anonymity (that is, I won't use your name or
> institution in conjunction with any server names) unless you
> specifically want to be identified or given credit for your statements.
> I plan on sharing my institution's server names in my article, but not
> say where they are from....
>
> thanks for considering this,
>
> Jody
>
> --
>
> Jody Condit Fagan
> Digital Services Librarian, James Madison University
> 540-568-4265
> [log in to unmask]
>
> "Machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time" -- Alan Moore
> http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html
>
>