I miss when we were allowed to name our servers however we wanted. We had groups like comic superheroes being database servers, fantasy book characters were email/messaging servers, sci Fi characters were file servers, and dead musicians were application servers. We’d get problems like Hendrix can’t connect to Hulk and everyone immediately knew the issue we were trying to solve.

Now everything is named with a two letter code for type, two more letters for location, two letters for the group it serves, and a two digit number. It looks random, but I can tell what server it is by glancing. However, I just miss the days when I could say “I don’t know what’s happening, but Dresden is fucked.”