Geeks and their computers

13 days ago I’ve bought another computer, thus reaching to number 3. My home network architecture is pretty simple:

As you might have noticed, my computers are named after Star Trek: The Next Generation characters. Let me describe them in their chronological order.

Picard is my former desktop which is now used primarily by my folks. Being an old timer, it’s the PC on which I’ve learned what’s Linux and on which I’ve developed several of my software projects from college. It still works okay, but comparing it with my latest acquisition, it’s slow and noisy.

Data was named like that because, at the time I bought it, it was the most powerful PC in the house, therefore resembling in a way with the famous android. I am still amazed by its capabilities when I compare the laptops available now in the same price range (it beats the crap out of them). My geekinees really emerged with the help of this machine, being capable of running Oracle DB, virtual machines, OC4J and many other power hungry appliances. It was the first machine on which, with the help of Mac4Lin, I began using the Mac OS X looks on an Ubuntu running computer (I never really quite liked the Human theme, nor any other default one). Since then all my machines share those looks (this will probably change with Ubuntu 10.04 which features an extremely nice looking theme, called Light).

Geordi is my beloved router, an Asus WL-500W draft N device which runs an alternate firmware that provides Samba and NFS access to the attached WD MyBook HDD, GIT (with gitosis), SVN, FTP, rTorrent (which accepts XML-RPC command through LIGHTTPD) and a dynamic DNS update client because my external IP is obtained using PPPoE. I’ve chosen Geordi as a name for the router because this device is responsible with the whole network and networking services, which is like The Engineering that La Forge led on the Enterprise. Also, the SSID for my wireless network is NCC-1701D (the code used for the USS Enterprise in the previous mentioned Star Trek series).

Geordi and Data have been bought together from my first salaries as an intern at Oracle (the place where I’ve began to master Linux).

Darwin is my iPod Touch 2^nd generation. Its name is pretty self explanatory and it’s the only one not related to Star Trek, although I’m thinking to change it in the near future in order to keep my hostnames consistent (any suggestions?). For the ones who still don’t know what I’m talking about, check this out.

And here we are to Riker (Number One). Even if now this machine is the most powerful computing device I own, I still won’t change the name of my laptop. Since no other character name from TNG was worthy for this machine (maybe with the exception of Worf), Riker seemed to be the most appropriate one. Bought primarily for use at my diploma project (which is still a secret to the public), this computer outperforms Data and Picard together when it comes to processing power. Also I’ve opted for the i7 and the LGA 1366 socket due to their high performance architecture and their (currently) slow rate of becoming outdated.

Now tell me, how do you name your machines? Do you have a clear naming strategy like I do (FYI my naming strategy respects RFC 952, RFC 1123 and RFC 1178 [useful for non-geeks too])?

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