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Submitted by ebyryan on Mon, 06/25/2007 - 8:34pm

Server Names

racks

Some people probably have interest in the naming schemes of servers and computers. There was a thread not too long ago on a library server discussing the various names. Here's a small sample of ours:

  • Bilbo
  • Frodo
  • Sauron
  • Pippin
  • Magwitch
  • Murkworks
  • Lutefisk
  • Borfin

And many more. Do you recognize all the names? The first four should be easy.

Comments

Submitted by eli on Wed, 06/27/2007 - 1:04am.

Heh, cool post. We do take server naming very seriously here... especially since once you get DSNs scattered all over the place, those names are stuck forever, so we don't usually opt for the nondescript. However, I did want to point out that while geeks are often huge tolkien fans, that's not really the reason we have servers named Frodo and Bilbo...

The original Frodo and Bilbo boxes were actually purchased used from WETA digital when they were upgrading their render farm after the first LoTR movie... they were selling these great SGI boxes at a great price including shipping and we thought it would be cool to own some of the hardware used to render the film. Of course we had to name them Frodo and Bilbo, no matter how cliche it was. Honestly, if we were pedigreed LoTR dorks we probably would have gone with Samwise or Smeagol or Smaug or Bombadil or something like that.

However, the services that wound up going into production on Frodo and Bilbo soon grew beyond the capacity of the original boxes (or they died at the wrong moment), so neither the current Frodo nor Bilbo are still those ex-WETA boxes. Once we had Frodo, Bilbo, and Pippin running around, when it came time to build a new firewall it was obvious that it had to be named Sauron.

My favorite name out of all of these is Borfin. That's our production webserver running Drupal. Luckily, it rarely needs un-schlumpfing.

eli