My private naming scheme is characters in childrens books by the Danish author Ole Lund Kirkegaard (usually short, slightly quirky, and unusual). I have started running out, so I have been adding - recently - nicknames of characters in PG Wodehouse's Jeeves books.

Currently:

virgil (home server)
tullinup (laptop)
clara (VPS, for DNS and backup mx)
anton (VPS, for DNS and backup mx)
kullekarlen (jukebox)
irene (phone)
corky (pc, PG Wodehouse)

Previously:

sille
karlemil
flora
topper
otto
læris
mads
gnalle
hodja
elfaza
vita
konggulerod
irenetv
frkravn

At work: farm animals (in Danish), and generalizing to other animals: Fish schools for servers for an application (fish size related to role/server size), zebras as a herd of cluster nodes, rodents for a specific purpose, pigs for a certain project, etc.

For both purposes I like to make lists of potential names in advance, as it might be hard to come up with a good name fitting both machine and purpose on the spot - it is nice to have a list to go through.

At work it's a wiki page, at home two text files.

(The concept of "cattle not pets" has reached my work place - I'm not thoroughly convinced that boring names are better, it's not like you have to treat the servers differently just because they have a fun name that makes it easier to remember what it is and what it does, also you are allowed to add aliases that describe the function in addition to the hostname, which also makes it easier to change the purpose of a machine, or move the service...)

@asjo I am *shocked*, *SHOCKED* I tell you, that there isn't a gummitarzan in there.

@asjo As I said downthread, I currently use famous dead mathematicians. I used to use lizard genera (tiliqua, lacerta, japalura, etc.), but I dropped that because I wanted to use that naming scheme for the fonts I design. :)

I'm getting tired of the mathematicians, so I'm thinking of switching to either the names of Elder Futhark runes (fehu, uruz, thurisaz, etc.) or characters from William Blake's mythology (oothoon, los, orc, urizen, etc.)

Ah, yes, the maths department at university also used mathematicians for machine names, now you mention it.

I think runes sounds like a nice scheme, not as common :-)

@asjo Bonus: My terminal font supports both Elder Futhark and long-staff Younger Futhark, so I could incorporate the actual rune as part of my zsh prompt!

@asjo (fun fact: "fehu" is the ancient root of the Danish word "fæ". It's also where English "fee" comes from - this is from a time where wealth and livestock was largely one and the same.)