naming scheme

I badly need to find a new naming scheme for my rapidly growing home network. At the moment the important hosts in the network have random names that were chosen on the spur of the moment (chicken, paperweight) or are remnants from naming schemes of past networks (dragon). A few systems are named or aliased functionally (mirror, phone). But I also have a lot of systems that are only used for testing, and so my network has been sprouting hosts named after the most prominent word on the peice of hardware: wavelan, aptiva, pavilion, ia64. But this will fail as soon as I get two pieces of similar hardware and besides it's booring.

I've never been any good at naming schemes though. There was a great series of blog entries aggregated on Planet Debian about this a while ago. It's too hard to find old weblog posts, but eventually I dug up LIW's summary

Since two of my machines, and two of the hardest to rename, were already named after animals, I've decided to use animal names for the naming scheme. To keep it from being too generic, I'll use only mythical creatures for laptops, and test machines will be named after invertebrates. Happily, I have few test machines that are also laptops. I decided to leave the functional names alone; it's too much fun to "nmap phone".

The final list in the same order as before is now chicken, kraken, dragon, (mirror, phone), limpet, jellyfish, earthworm, elephant. I even added a block of 16 pre-assigned names for new machines on the test network so I needn't worry about it for a while.