I use Roman authors, with the machine/VM’s purpose (often vaguely) linked to what the author was known for. For example, my NAS is called Tacitus (a historian), while my game server is called Plautus (a playwright). A couple services predate my schema (like my Pihole and OPNSense box) and are named descriptively.

Fun fact: When AOL was still operating in Germany, internal servers in their network were named after characters / things from Asterix comics, like Asterix, Obelix, Idefix, Miraculix and even Hinkelstein (menhir). When Telecom Italia bought them up they unfortunately got rid of all these and replaced them with standard corpo server names. Source: I worked there.

One of my nicknames is Hugo. I have a Windows, a macOS, a Debian and a Raspbian machine.

So I call them Hugowin, Hugotosh and Hugopi. The Debian machine mostly runs Plex so it is named Plexy. And my Phone is called iBobes because someone once told me that Bobes mean ass in german and i though that is incredibly funny.

For personal machines, I use rivers.

At work we use superheroes.

For hobby projects, cute 4 letter words (it’s a challenge), for example bubu and alia.

All of my personal machines are Autobots.

At work we use space probes (Voyager, Pioneer, New Horizons, etc). We’re a small satellite communications company.

Battlestar Galactica years ago. Dradis for the domain name and ships for the computers.

Galactica.dradis Pegasus.dradis Basestar.dradis And so on. Made it fun.

I have no naming consistency, whatever I feel like that day is what it’s name ends up with.

I’m incredibly boring. I name them with the company/model name. And what role they have appended.

We did reindeer; Dasher, Dancer, Vixen, etc.

Ungulates. Because who doesn’t like a hoofed animal?

My client machines are even-toed ungulates (order Artiodactyla) and my servers/IoT machines are odd-toed (order Perissodactyla). I’m typing this on Gazelle. My router is called Quagga, both after the extinct zebra subspecies and the routing protocol software (I don’t use it any more but hey, it’s a router).

Biological taxonomy is a great source of a huge number of systematic (and colloquial) names.

I use different types, cultivars, or alternative names for potatoes. Device names over the years have included: russet, yukon gold, ranger, marispiper, vivaldi, ratte, snowden, spud, and tater.

My Synology is named Atlas because it’s my main file storage box (and has a most of my services running on it).

My VPS is called Aurora after the atmospheric phenomenon because cloud server.

And my little laptop I installed a server Linux distro on is called Challenger because I find it challenging to work with Fedora Server sometimes

I do models for laptops and case names for my built desktop. So Dell-3590 or my desktop is NR400.

I know who has what so its easy to manage if i want to cut off network access or transfer files.

Ship names from the expanse.

My PC is the Rocinante My home server was previously the Behemoth, put it in a smaller case so now it’s Medina.

Personally I use corporate-like naming scheme for my devices, the format is:

[AABB-CCCC-DDEE]

AA: Location of the device - HQ (home), CL (cloud).
BB: Role of the device - HV (hypervisor), SV (server), NW (network) and workstation (WS).
CCCC: Device brand (for NW), application running (for SV), and workstation purpose (for WS).
DD: For server and workstation - OS running on the device (WN=Windows, LX=Linux, MA=macOS). For network device - their role on network (RT=router, AP=access point, SW=switch).
EE: # of the device, year of purchase for WS.

For example, here’s my router, KASM server and my gaming PC hostnames:

HQNW-UBNT-RT01
HQSV-KASM-LX01
HQWS-GAME-WN16

Still trying to optimize this naming scheme, like removing all the dash, but currently too lazy to do it lol.