Continuing the meme:
- lucien – not strictly owned by me, but the first Linux machine I had influence over. Named by my college roommate after Lucien from the Sandman comics, the librarian of The Dreaming. Seemed right for a computer.
- locutus – this name served multiple machines in late college. It was my desktop at home, at work at Motorola, and at my HP post at UIUC. For a while, all three were simultaneously online. They all had different domain names, so it seemed sensible and little comical. The name itself comes from my infatuation with the Borg of Star Trek fame. Locutus was the first to have an individual designation.
- clam – given to multiple machines, but both laptops (an ancient Toshiba, and a more recent Mac). Like clamshell mobile phones, laptops look the same.
- boofis – served as the name for a public XTerm for guests, and later as a desktop machine. This was based on a friend’s alternate word for “thingy” or “dohicky”.
- naboo – currently the home firewall, but was my desktop when it was new. From the Star Wars planet Naboo.
- cube – always the home multimedia server hooked to the TV, but has had three incarnations. Originally, it was a Shuttle box, which was, frankly, cube shaped. It was also influenced again by the Borg, and it was around here that I started to notice a strange and unintentional trend in my computer names: they nearly all had an “oou” sound. Since then I’ve usually managed to avoid it, but have tried to include at least 1 if not 2 “o” letters in future computer names.
- stompy – currently the home disk server, but was my desktop when it was new. Named based on a game my wife and I play with our dogs called Stompy Stompy Bad Thing, in which we slowly approach our dog like a Sumo wrestler, and the dog goes crazy barking and running in circles.
- ox – current laptop. Compared to the Toshiba from 1999, it’s like an ox, even if now it’s 3 years old itself.
- gorgon – current desktop. Loosely based on the concept that the most famous gorgon has multiple heads. As this is a 4-way machine, it seemed fitting.
- nushooz – currently my wife’s desktop, but was mine prior to gorgon, but named differently. Current name is based on the freaky “*pft* New shoes!” line from Twin Peaks.
© 2008, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.