My previous post brings up, tangentially, naming schemes. Most administrators have some formula for determining what to call the computers on their networks. Inner Drive is no different.
For years, I bought only Gateway computers, and because Gateways come in cow-spotted boxes, I named all of them some kind of cow. For no reason I can remember, I did this in German[1]. So over the years I had these computers:
Then I got a Dell laptop, because it was at the time a better value. That one I called "keineküh," or, "not a cow."
Once I started Inner Drive, Dell gave the company a line of credit and Gateway didn't. As a consequence (Gateway, are you reading this?) we only buy Dells, and we changed our naming scheme to follow. "Dell" means "valley" in Old English (whence we get "dale"), which is "tal" in German. But since that was in 2005, and we've recently grown up changed our naming scheme again, the "tal" scheme only produced one name: Frühtal, a laptop.
Our new naming scheme, since January 2006, uses geographical entities. Servers are named after Illinois counties; desktops and laptops after Chicago suburbs, spiralling out from Cook County and Evanston pretty much in the order we built them (except for Cook, which is brand-new):
Anyone else want to share their naming schemes?
[1] I know very little German, none of it useful. For example, I can say with some authority, "Ich bin kein Kugelschreiber." I can also say, "Altes Brot ist grünes Brot" and "Die Hauptbahnhof ist nicht blau." I also know how to say some things that I can't put in this blog, but are pretty funny when translated.