But in the Latin, super-user begins with an "I"!

It's always interesting to see how things are named technical areas. Back in undergrad, one of my friends who'd been given the responsibility for setting up (including naming) the new group of servers asked around the office and our circle of friends how he should name them, and from something like 20 people he literally got 30-something answers (two people kept on coming back to him with new ideas).

It's a widely varying and rather personal choice, with the added complexity administrative intervention. Servers here used to be named after astronomical objects; planets, moons, comets, stars, etcetera. As the number of servers increased, the names broadened to mythological figures (Greek and Roman gods, etcetera). And then a manager handed down "All servers will be named based on environment, OS, and function!" so now servers have boring names like "WSPROD01" and "FAQUAL04". Bah humbug. I guess it's easier when you're up to a couple hundred servers, but it's still immensely boring.

I've seen servers at places named after super-heroes ("Go grab those files off of Green Lanturn and copy them to Superman, will you?"); I've seen them named after countries and cities ("Uh oh, London's down and Rwanda's throwing exceptions because it can't reach its database!"); I've seen them named after presidents ("Make sure to expose Washington's port 80 outside the firewall, and close off FTP on Jefferson."); I've seen them named after wild animals ("We're going to re-configure Grizzly Bear, Fruit Bat, and White Tiger as a cluster."). It's always fun to see what they pick, given free reign.

The last time I had to name computers (or re-name, really), I had 7 machines I was naming. I obviously named them after the seven deadly sins. The only one of those 7 which is currently still alive is Sloth, my laptop; the rest have all been retired and gotten rid of. It's sad, really... I miss them. I do still have a second machine (my iMac!) but it doesn't have a name; it's just whatever the default is, which I honestly don't know for MacOS. I've only ever set up an iMac twice in my life, and one of the two times were long enough ago that I don't remember it clearly. Besides, my iMac doesn't get used terribly often.

This came up in my team meeting Monday morning, peripherally. At the end, my manager asked if anyone had any issues, and one of my co-workers mentioned that his super-user account didn't work. This transitioned to other super-users being set up in production, and then naming conventions. All "S" accounts are "sample" accounts (S-STPETERS); all "I" accounts are "internal" (I-BJONES). Someone asked how they'd picked "i", and the Indiana Jones joke came up.

This is the kind of thing that happens at work when you work with geeks. >.<

As a final note, I'll leave you with my favorite quote from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Indiana Jones: It's disgraceful, you're old enough to be her... her grandfather.
Professor Henry Jones: Well, I'm as human as the next man.
Indiana Jones: Dad, I *was* the next man.