Slashdot Mirror
Suggestions for Unique Names for a Server Room?
clutch110 asks: "I have been tasked with coming up with a name for our soon-to-be server room. Our president is renowned for these small tasks. I was told to create something funny and not nearly as obvious as 'Company Server Room'. So I come in hope that your everlasting humor can help me complete my quest for the most unique server room name in existance."
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
Blinkenroom
Das B00T!
if it's in the basement you can always call it:
Moria
The Ninth Circle
(with individual servers named Faust, Mephisto, Lucifer, Phil, ect...ect...)
If it's a small room, you can just stick a british "Police" sign on the outside (ala Dr. Who).
if you are running really big iron, place a "Welcome to Urbana Illinios" sign on the door. (birth place of H.A.L., S.A.L., et al.)
but if you have a DC fetish (come on we can smell our own here, it's Slashdot) you can choose from christening it the "Fortress of Solitude", "Bat Cave", "OA", or "S.T.A.R. Labs"
BTW someone sugested "the Brothel" LOL, wouldn't be so sure that the suits wouold be happy to roll along with that one.
--
I bent my Wookie!
How about you put up a sign called Engineering and have everyone refer to you as Scotty!
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
While you're at it, if you've got three large servers you can call them Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, and collectively "The Magi".
And major system problems can henceforth be named/numbered after the Angels. "Uh oh - the Second Angel has attacked."
OK, OK, I've just been watching Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'll go and lie down now...
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
The Meat Locker.
I don't know about you, but every server room I've been in has been freezing. Whenever I enter a server room for extended periods of time, I make sure I have a coat.
in a comic vein..
"Danger Room"
old movie vein
"Emerald City"
random vein
"There be Monsters"
"Mind the Gap"
"Internet Invented Here"
"Abandon all Hope"
"The Shrine"
"Rear Command Center"
"Jedi Academy"
"Janitors Closet"
I could go all night.. but that would lame, and I need to catch up on my slee.....
ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzz.....
The room of eternal dispair
The "mybosswantedmetocomeupwithanameforthis" Room
The Bathroom
The Transporter Room
The...oh hey look a bunny!
if you are running linux servers
Anarctica
The Penguin Room
If you are running windows servers
The Oh Please God(s) Kill Me Now room
and my personal favorite...
over/down/up there
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
In the spirt of Peter's Evil Overlord list:
65. If I must have computer systems with publically available terminals, the maps they display of my complex will have a room clearly marked as the Main Control Room. That room will be the Execution Chamber. The actual main control room will be marked as Sewage Overflow Containment.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
404: NotFound
Bah!
ACHTUNG! Alles touristen und non-technischen peepers!
Das machine control is nicht fur gerfinger-poken und mittengrabben. Oderwise is easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowen fuse, und poppencorken mit spitzensparken.
Der machine is diggen by experten only. Is nicht fur geverken by das dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken sightseenen keepen das cotten picken hands in das pockets, so relaxen und watchen das blinkenlights.
Call it: "Obsolete by the time you're done reading this sign"
well, of course ... i would assume that your wife would already have a name and therefore you wouldn't need to name her *again* ... that would just be silly
09
I used to work at UBS Warburg (Swissbank) and they had a meeting room that was titled 'Triskadekaphobia' on the 12th floor.
Triskadekaphobia == Fear of the number 13.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
Call it The Basket. Then you can refer to the machines as Eggs.
/dev/urandom or whatever that command is, then tack the output on the door. If you wanted to be really creative, you could put up a little LED sign that outputs /dev/urandom. That way your server room will always have a unique name. Everyone will just refer to it as the server room no matter what name you pick, so why not give them a good reason to use the generic term?
You could also call it the Don't Panic room, or the Champagne Room, or the One True Server Room, or the Fruity Pebbles room, or the Room Without A Window, or the Mush Room, or the Big Blue Room (or, alternatively, the Little White/Gray/Whatever Room).
You asked for unique though. Most unique thing I can think of is to cat
If so, feel free to use this one:
"FOR SALE: SLIGHTLY USED"
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
[airport code][descriptive code]
For example: CHIWST, Chicago West datacenter. West could be the part of the city, or the part of the building. Add a number on the end if you're feeling kinky. Or maybe something obvious to the front like "DC".
You won't get slammed if what you end up creating makes some logical sense, though. You could call it "CHARLIE" and name the next datacenter (if there is one) "DELTA".
... for all the fantasies that the PHB will want you to create for him?
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
Bit Bucket
How about a sign that says:
SETEC ASTRONOMY
We call ours the Houston room. Even though the joke is very old now, everyone loves to say "Houston, we have a problem!"
Then call it "Goatse" Why? Because each server has one big GAPPING hole in it.
... "Task is not a verb" room?
Soiled Utility Closet
Biohazard Disposal
Radiography
Carivore Den
Depreciated Hardware
OZ
Office Supply
Electron Containment
or... just Office Storage
--Mike--
One of my customers has a lab in an unlikely part of the building. On the door it says "Accounts Receivable." When you walk in, its one of the most validation labs I've ever seen. Instead of a funny name like "Everyone on slashdot complains of not sleeping because they think it makes them sound cool", name it another corporate department.
Oh the irony of asking Slashdot for something unique and original...........
I've always liked the name "Bob"...
... in (a) reference to the fact that only partial bugs remain (milli being 1/1000th), and (b) that's where they all end.
You could've hired me.
When we moved into our new digs, a sign on the server room already read "The Bat Cave". I just had to keep it there. Now we just need a red phone.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Pit of Despair.
What else can you call it when you're told to come up with a non-obvious name for something that needs a real name.
Runner up: Sisyphus.
I've always been partial to the Neuromancer universe. Call the room "Villa Straylight", and the main sever "Wintermute". Then get your job title changed to "Chief of Turing Police".
Instead of putting a fixed nameplate on the door to the server room at the high school where I work, we mounted the kind that you can slide plates in and out of. The plan is to accumulate different plates over time and rotate between them.
Here are the ones that we've used so far (It's only been a few months):
Other suggestions are welcome (I plan to steal liberally from those already posted).
It also seemed like a good idea at the time to inscribe, "Hey! Put that back" on the front (covered) side of the faceplate holder.
... and use the proceeds to buy a new coffee pot or better coffee for the old coffee pot or something...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
'Serious' one: "Colossus World Control Headquarters" (or something very close to this, I haven't seen the movie in a while.)
Funny one: "Home of the WOPR"
~Philly
"Kim just crashed"
yeah, but see that's the one chance a computer geek will get to say something like, "Kim just went down on me"...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Ages ago I worked with someone who (with malace aforethought) got everyone to refer to the small room where we delt with all the network/phone interconnects as "the Wiring Closet", and then started shortening it to "the W. C." in memos, and finally (once everyone was numbed to it) put a sign on the door with just the letters "WC".
And then he waited waited...
--MarkusQ
The problem with this is that you wouldn't logically be able to keep any computers named after cheeses in there. Then John Cleese would have to feel guilty as he shot you.
This sig no verb.
You know how many restrooms have the icon for "men" and "women"? How about such a sign for "propeller-heads", after the old geek trend of wearing the propeller-beanie?
This sig no verb.
I named a test lab 'companyname Proving Ground' once. That could work for a server room also...
I also named all the machines and user accounts (used for testing) after famous disasters, e.g. hindenberg, pinto, bush, etc.
Full disclosure: I didn't come up with the name myself; thanks Baba.
... The magic voodoo box room.
How ya like dat?
No manual entry for server room
server room: nothing appropriate
you could call it :
X forward...
nad name all your machines "alien ship 0001", so that way you can have aliens crashing at roswell.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
reading:
"This is not an exit..."
Have everyone refer to you as "Patrick" or "Mr. Bateman".
is that anyone with a little social engineering can get a lead on what 'theme' you are using to name the boxen in that room. One place I worked had a complete Beatles theme going on; including some database passwords being obscure Beatles references like "28 if". The wallpapers on all of them were sketches of the band.
Yet another place used X-Files - hundreds of names and references and insider jokes I couldn't even figure out with my wife being the X-Files nutjob she is...
In a Coast Guard facility I worked in all the printers were named after Lord of the Rings characters - that's right we attached to Legolas to print our Remedy ARS reports.
My favorite has always been the name for a PBX/Server room at a national training facility I once worked in: The Batcave. Fortunately, nothing else inside was named after the comic - could you imagine the Nortel Meridian console being named "Joker"?
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Skynet
That was the ultra computer in Terminator, then of course you have a good selection of names Sara, John, T1000, Arnold, Connor, Terminator, T2, T3 what have you.
Of course, everyone will have to say "I'll be back" when they leave.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
Build a redundant button into the wall, and put a sign above it that says: "Do Not Push!". Then see how many people you can get to push it, and show it at X-Mas parties.
Does anyone remember 'the really big button that doesn't do anything' web page? That was hilarious.
Anyway, if it's Linux, call it Anchorage, then put some cool arctic style posters up with penquins along the shoreline. We had a room call Bedrock once. The main server was called Wilma, other nicknames Barney, Fred and a little mac mail server was called Pebbles. I'm into simple names now, like 'The Hub'. Sort of like 'the pub' because everyone comes in to hang out, but there's no booze.
...the college of engineering at my old university did something similar with the isolated subnets.
There'd be a bunch of machines, called bilbo, frodo, gandalf, etc, on a net of their own, and diamond, ruby, emerald, etc, on a net of their own. For each net, another machine with two network cards would be their bridge to the outside world. Each of the network cards had its own name -- and this is where the geekiness comes out -- and the names would be for the same thing.
So one card on the bridge would be rivendell, and the other would be imladris. One card would be gem and the other jewel. Things like that. One of the sysadmins had never read Tolkien, and the network topology of room 355 always confused him until someone explained the names.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Washington DC has a combined sewer system. Basically, this means that there are not seperate sanitary (ie, toilets) and storm sewers. When there hasn't been rain in a while, leaves and other assorted trash will collect up in the storm sewers. When a hard rain comes, it will back up the storm sewers, and there's always a questions of exactly what else might have floated up from the drains.
Our machine room just happens to be in a basement. [Until a couple of years back, there was a glass wall to the outside, too, so it obviously wasn't well planned] I think it was late 2000 (maybe early 2001), when we had a sewer backup on the same block our building was. There was an inch or so of standing water on the ground floor. There was sewage leaking from the ceiling above into our machine room, onto the machines, and into flooring [raised floor, so of course, all of the power runs through the floor].
Needless to say, the smell was not so wonderful, although anything chunky was filtered out by the seeping through the concrete floor/ceiling. It did manage to cause the ceiling tiles in the machine room to crumble, and they had to replace anything that couldn't be easily disinfected in another room on that floor (chairs, cubicle walls, etc).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
"Are you being serverd?"
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
The Boudoir [sp?]
The Bronx
Somewhere Else
The Operating Room
The Swamp (ala M*A*S*H)
Check Point Charlie (ah the days of the Cold War)
Cryogenic Storage/The Fridge
MIR
Detroit
The Bunker
38 North Yankee (Ah the Korean War)
Hiroshima/Nagasaki
Chernobyl/Three Mile Island
The Playground
The Gulag
Angband
Compton
Malkovich
Birdland
The Mother Ship
The Dark TOwer
Heritcorp
Columbia Internet
The Dimension of Pain
Olympus/Kilamanjaro/Denali/K2/Everest
The Satellight odf Love
Paris
Istanbul (not Constantinople)
Dien Bien Phu/Dak Tow/Da Nang...
Iwo Jima/Pearl Harbor/Midway...
Dover, Delaware
Epicenter
The Brain
Nirvana
Yggdrasil/Asgard/Midgard/Bifrost
Kalevala/Pohjola (Lets hear it for Deities and Demigods)
Lankhmar/Newhom
Camelot
The Citidel
The Nucleus
THe Moon
The Core
IT
Oakland
The Conservatory (With the Candlestick)
These are climbs in Yosemite:
Wyoming Sheep Ranch
Zodiac
The Nose
Salathe
Central Pillar of Frenzy
Serenity Crack
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
Well, we don't have a name for our server room, but our JumpStart server is named Frostbitefalls. (Because it's so f'n cold in there!)
...
Being that it jumpstarts hosts on a zillion subnets, it has other IP's (and DNS entries as appropriate, such as):
Boris
Natasha
Sherman
Peabody
Bullwinkle
and, of course:
Flying-Squirrel (since rocky was already taken by the west-coast guys... they have a stallone theme goin' on)
The TSM backup server is named wayback. Heh. I thought it was appropriate
also:
Just some thoughts . . .
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
If you pick a theme for your server names at the same time, the name for the server room can be quite straightforward. Name them after fish and a roomful becomes a school. Name 'em after birds and it becomes a flock. There are lots of collective nouns out there just waiting to be used.
So my suggestion would be to name them after orchestra instruments, so you could justify calling the place "The Pit" :-)
according to anohter post of him :
NIS lookups (Score:1)
by clutch110 (528473) Alter Relationship on Thu 12 Dec 08:33PM (#4873590)
I found out that our NIS server was giving those exact results. We had NIS clients on all Windows machines and of course all unix/Linux machines were nis too.
my vote is for neil and bob
Or just call it server room 2 (if you have only 1).
Any company that tasks a worker with coming up with a unique name for the server room clearly belongs in my fuckedcompany deadpool.
You forgot...
"All Your Bases"
Do you lots of glass walls....then I would suggest for you...!
The fishbowl!
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
The zoo was our name of one defunct companies server room.. The machines were beasts and a mix of os (linux/ms/sun). The machines were also given animal names.. It was nice and not too geeky.
I tend to arrive at companies when they are transitioning from "small" companies with a cool culture to corporate culture.
At the last place that I worked, we had a really cool descriptive naming scheme that was funny and very descriptive of where the computers were. The one day the CEO decreed that we would use naming codes... database servers would be renamed db01 db02 db03... web www01 www02.
Where I am now (a very large environment) hostnames are 9-12 characters long. There is actually a spreadsheet to name a server! You get gobblygood names like oapapa1234a1p, because every character needs to mean something. (That example would be an powerpc aix server running oracle in production with redundant power in production)
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Put a placard on the door reading, "Manhatten Project", after the nuclear weapons programme, and name the servers after nuclear weapons, which could be descriptive, too. Fat man, little boy, then newer weapons: Trident, etc. Or, go total geek and name them after Quake III characters. Lucy, Sarge, Doom, Xaero, etc. There should be plenty of them to work with.
If all my base are belong to you and I attempt to retrieve my base, does that mean I'm freebasing?
Siggy Wiggy Figgy Tiggy a bana bo Biggy!
Do a Google search for some of the famous European salt mines, and pick a name you like.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Not only that, but they worked in a mine, so this theme could be replicated.
Now, if there is a Snow White, or a wicked witch of the West.....
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Name it after a historic event, a place in a well-known book, or perhaps even something from a movie.
Suggests:
The Matrix: Almost anybody gets that one
NeverNever Land: For MS machines, because that's where data goes too in some cases...
Tarterus (sp?): Depends on how much you like your job.
Might also depend on what you name your servers, or what you plan to name them. You could have a theme place from a book, and name your servers after the characters.
Which reminds me, I was going to ask a very similar question... as to what cool names people have heard for servers. We have ours named after Political Figures and trees here. I have the first server of my own being built and was thinking of naming it after a celestial body, or perhaps a galaxy
I've heard many stories about the server farm that NeXT used to have in their Redwood City, California office. Their "Bat Cave" was a small room packed full of black NeXT cubes and slabs. It's been rumored that much of the NeXT server farm still exists at Apple, as does a collection of every NeXT model and OS version on display for testing and "research".
as mentioned in a previous comment, NeXT computer (founded by Steve Jobs, now owned by Apple) named their server room the Bat Cave as well. Mostly because it was filled to the brim with black NeXT cubes and NeXTstations.
The Dimention of Pain!
Server Room or Computer Room. SHEESH! I do like neat names and stuff but what does a name have to do with how it works? Why do you have to come up with a neat name for it? Why can't you just call it what it is?
Gorkman
I'd recommend the adoption of the telecommunications standard of CLLI(tm) (COMMON LANGUAGE® Location Codes)
More information on CLLI(tm) can be found at Common Language Products.
I wouldn't advise actually paying to register the codes, but I would follow the guidelines, they've worked for a long long time in the organization of the worlds largest network.