When there are so many people working in a computing environment, each with different tastes, interests, and ideals, it is very difficult to come up with a consistent naming scheme for hosts and servers.
Here at FIU-SCS, this is quite apparent. The names of animals dominate our servers, mostly big cats (cheetah, tiger, leopard, cougar, ferret, etc.). A bunch of machines in the graduate lab are named after characters from "The Lion King" (scar, zazu, rafiki, shenzi, pumbaa, timon) and most of the machines in the JCCL lab are named after various animals and environments (lizard, garden, mongoose, crowned, etc.)
These names reflect the interest of many individuals in FIU-SCS, including myself (responsible for the big cat and Lion King names). While this scheme may be confusing to some, the truth is that it reflects a little bit of all our personalities and makes for a subtly more interesting computing experience for the user.
I personally dislike numeric names, such as the "n-series" of machines that the HPDRC group here uses. These names are completely uninteresting and tell you nothing about the personality of the user on that machine. While this may be necessary when you have an extremely large number of machines and a high user turnover rate, it certainly makes dealing with the machines less interesting.
Hopefully we will preserve the art of machine naming for the years to come. It makes life a little more interesting for the sysadmin, and allows a bit of the user's personality to show through the name he or she picks for their machine.
Here is a link to RFC 1178, Naming Your Computer. It provides tips for naming your machine. If you work at SCS and your system has a really boring name, let me know! Maybe I can do something about it.
-- John Flynn (flynnj at cs.fiu.edu), from vixen.cs.fiu.edu, 8/13/2003