One thing I picked up from my time working with HP and our regional hospitals, it was the novelty of naming conventions. Being a closet Star Trek nerd I recognized the names pretty quick. Enterprise, Reliant, Defiant, Antares. These are federation ship names. This piece of trivia escaped most of my colleagues and I wasn’t about to make fun of them for not being nerdy enough.

Then my another job site featured space objects. Our Firewall server was Sun, our file server Earth, a giant beast of a server we purchased and called Galaxy (which contained a number of VMWare servers), our secondary Domain Controller was Mars, while printers were typically named after orbiting moons. I’m sure you see the correlation.

I never much liked the names of our planets due to Roman mythological origin. For some reason I always took it personal that it was blatantly stolen from the Greeks and simply relabelled. The Greeks were far more inventive and original. And so I always had in mind the naming convention my domain would have.

A year or so ago I began to realize that vision.

I configured a local domain controller which I named Zeus. The domain I called Pantheon.local. My “Windows Home Server” is Athena, the goddess of Wisdom (as my backup server, this is the repository of all my information). My development server is Haphaestus: the god of the forge, and the inspiration for my site banner. My wife’s PC which she inherited from me is Aphrodite – the goddess of love.

I rent a suite from my parents upstairs. But it’s not a typical nerd living in his mom’s basement kind of situation. As such, I’ve included my mom’s system in the domain and her laptop is Hera. Technically this is a departure from the naming convention since Hera was the wife of Zeus and thus should have equal power, say, as a secondary domain controller. But somehow I remember Hera as “mother” better due to my fondness of the TV shows Hercules and Xena. And don’t think the parallel is lost on her, as I think she’s mildly offended I equated her with the evil queen of the gods.

There is also Demeter, who I configured as a secondary development server and yet I can’t recall why I named her that – she was the bringer of seasons. Of course then I have my trusty Samsung CLP-610 ND (Color Laser Printer with Network+Duplexing), which is Hermes the messenger of the gods, whose label I found particularly fitting.

And that pretty much covers it. My server needs are always expanding as do the names. Some servers have come and gone like Strife, Atalanta, Hercules or Hades, so these names sort of sit in a pool until I have need of another.

Anyone care to share their domain server naming convention?