It’s kind of fun to have a few weird names. My laptops have fun names. Right now I have “Okavango Delta” and “Phoenix”.
All of my WiFi networks begin with Aardvark (shows up first in the network list) and all of my iOS devices are Aardwolf (shows up after Aardvark when used as a hotspot).
I worked at a company where all the server names were named after mountains. I totally get it for things that have no meaningful name possible. "Server Three" doesn't actually give you much information, I already know it's a server, and them being numerically ordered adds nothing either. So why not be fun with it.
Variable names on the other hand can carry a lot of information, and naming them arbitrarily misses that opportunity for clarity.
Nobody wants to spell empedokles at 4am. And if you're not the person who has to deal with this problem, then you are a dick to whoever does, if you name a server something like this.
"server three" actually does give you information. It's a server. Not a router. Not a firewall. Not a load balancer. Not a desktop. Not a laptop. Not your HSM. Not the telco gear. Etc... etc...
If "well I don't have any of those things", then sure, whatever. If you have three servers, then it doesn't matter.
But then you grow a bit. And now you have 20 servers, and kinda matters that you have a pattern that IS NOT "greek vs roman gods", but maybe "diskfulls" and "CPU-monsters". At a previous company we named these "db<n>" and "quick<n>". And did not reuse numbers, because then we could also infer the hardware generation (lower number means older hardware).
db<n> wasn't even running any relational database. We could have named them "storage<n>", and it wouldn't have made a difference to the fact that the name was incredibly useful.
Sometimes you can save the company your entire year's salary by reducing an outage by the few minutes not making typos or misunderstanding about "is this part of prod or not?". Communication is important, and coming up with the "funniest" name is not so funny when the site is down and you're trying to figure out the problem.
Fair enough, I think it's clear that "it depends" then because those were not issues for us and our set up. We weren't running a server farm, these were just internal development servers, the parts that did have context were named appropriately like "Production, Staging, Feature-1" etc. The networking was trivial. I am sure you are right and that if it had grown, a naming convention would be nice.
I do get a bit tired of the Everything is Enterprise approach to software. We aren't all trying to scale to the moon, and enterprise tooling has it's own costs.
I also worked at a company where all the machines were named after mountains! The company was named MountainGate, so this was probably unavoidable. "Dana" and "Tresidder" sat on my desk.
A few maybe. But when you have 50 routers, 60 switches, and 10 firewalls, then it's not exactly fun to need to start thinking about if this name is latin or greek, and how exactly do you even spell it?
Your laptop? Barely matters. Won't show up in a traceroute.
I tend to keep the chaos at higher levels of abstraction. All of my home automation devices have printed labels with a number. (I have way too many.) The same number goes on the device name in Home Assistant. If one of the remotes ends up in the wrong room, it’s easy to look up where it belongs.
However, the internal applications I maintain at my day job have fun, easy to spell names. The servers they go on are prefixed with that name with their function after it. e.g.“snowplow db”. Everyone knows (or learns) that snowplow is the custom UI for the big SNP printers.
I’ve found having a name that’s short and relatively related in some way keeps different departments from coming up with their own shorthand way of referring to the programs.
All of my WiFi networks begin with Aardvark (shows up first in the network list) and all of my iOS devices are Aardwolf (shows up after Aardvark when used as a hotspot).