Games from my childhood. Moon Patrol, Galaga, Zaxxon, Twin Bee, Xevious, Gradius, etc.

Yup. I'm that old.

I usually name mine after songs that I happen to be listening to at the moment.

Transformers 😁

Science fiction spacecraft - Enterprise, Nostromo, Tardis, Falcon, etc.

My unraid server is called Mothership. Everything else is called what it is because I'll get confused if they had cute names

I tend to name mine after their physical appearance, though I'm leaning towards space-related names now.

I'll copy a Discord message I sent someone while explaining my naming scheme:

in chronological order: my very old laptop was black and grey so it was Batman my first build had orange/gold fans so it was Aurum my next build was black and white so it was Mono my current build had lots of RGB so it was Nova (like supernova) my home server has the BitFenix wings logo so it was Flight my laptop is sleek and pretty speedy so it was Comet

I don't have a very consistent naming theme. I've used various names related to music, science, and art. I have a decomissioned machine named "numbers" for example.

However, I would like to point out we have plenty more than 8 celestial bodies of interest in the solar system if you include Eris, Ceres, Pluto, Makemake, the moons of Jupiter, and more. It might not be indefinitely extendable, but may help in the short term.

I name devices after Greek Gods / Goddesses. My main server is called Olympus.

Star Trek ships at home. And Game of Thrones characters at work.

I’ve used Star Trek names before, but in general I’ve just started naming them what they’re used for (ex. Dev-Mint, StorageCore)

I use the names of chemical elements, but with two twists: I assign them in the order in which they appear in the song "The Elements" by Tom Lehrer, and I use the German names. So I have (or had), among others, Wasserstoff, Sauerstoff, Stickstoff, etc ...

I've been doing birds. So far I just have Cardinal, Bluebird, and Sparrow

Domestic no Kanojo is an anime that people describe as rubbish. Maybe it is, depending on where you're coming from, but I was invested in it, and so decided to honour the anime/manga by naming my servers "Hina Tachibana", "Natsuo Fujii", "Rui Tachibana" and "Miu Ashihara".

Started with Evangelion Magi naming and now I just use the pet name generator in Terraform.

Random_pet

My main machine is Suckup (Second Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultra-Micro Programmer), my laptop is Tuckup (Third Universal etc), my phone is Keitaichan (keitai being Japanese for mobile phone), my tablet is Tabbuchan (from Japanese taburetto for tablet), my NAS is Shinochan (from shinorojii, Japanese for Synology), because I am absolutely insufferable and unimaginative and I crack myself up.

US states. If I have more than 50 different host names to manage, I should re-evaluate my hobbies. And then lazily move on to US state capitals.

You gotta have the concepts the machines are named after change as the nature of the machine changes (and bonus points if the nature of the concept is analogous to the nature of the machine). E.g. if my main machines were planets, then when I added servers they would be named after space hardware (hubble, webb, iss, etc). Raspberry Pis can be ceres, eros, vesta, juno, etc. It actually genuinely helps by distributing around within your brain the placement of which machine corresponds to which concept or which name, and also it frees up more names when you start having tons of machines in different categories.

I've had tons of naming schemes over the years (chemical elements and classic video games were two that I used for different banks of machines) and I've done that system with good results.

I have a weird one: years ago I called one machine "nudl" (like using one's noodle but with a weird spelling). Now I've got a few different nudls, a strudl, a dudl, and I think there's a pudl in the closet somewhere.

On my labs cluster they are named after famous physicists

At my first job/internship it was fish names (they were dev/qa servers so wiped almost daily): Crappie, Bluegill, Walleye, Marlin, etc.

Current job is medical so it's all professional (i.e gr01sec02, gr02sccm01)

At home I've got a couple of naming schemes for different device types.:

Phones: i-telleuwat(last 4 of the number)
PCs and Media centers: playon(last octet of the IP)
Servers:gimme(service thats hosted)

I recently switched to using the periodic table. I made myself a nice little spreadsheet to keep track of it all. I used to name hosts after random stuff like cereal, snacks, or just plain old [my first name]-desktop.

cakes then a different type of cake. ie cakesFlan

Bird species, most of the time. I look for a bird that seems to have some connection with the intended purpose of the box, then use that. e.g. my work computer's hostname is cormorant.

My Raspberry Pi's are named after planets and large bodies on the Solar system.

My servers are named after The Expanse characters and ships.

VM's and CT's after their usage with a tag in Proxmox for the OS used.

I give them weird syntax names so if someone was to hack in the names wouldn't give away what they are immediately. I don't reuse numbers so that if I rebuild something it gets a new num.

Location-Ordinal-NetworkNum-Counter Eg AU-01-01-01

Containers are just their application name except where I have more than 1 then its Application01,02,etc.

I do Reboot characters, since I'm old! Kind of running low now but I call each of my phones Glitch and it makes me very happy.

Lowercaps Dwarfplanets. chaos, orcus, ixion, ceres, haumea, makemake, etc. DHCP/router is named sol

Scientists/inventors for me - bonus points if I can find one related to the machine's purpose (Kodi machine named after a contributor to the TV for example)

WoW places. Since some of my servers died, I'm currently only sitting on dark portal (Firewall), and the Stranglethorn Valley server with Gurubashi Arena (Plex), Booty Bay (you can imagine) and wild shore (shared file system VM)

Pretty much same as you: If it works for NASA or it's a heavenly body, it works for me. Main PC is called SATURN V (SATURN for most things). Laptop is called HYPERION. Currently saving up to replace SATURN with ARTEMIS. Might throw in a GAIA NAS/virtualization server at some point, if cash flow allows for it. I'm not as picky about my family's devices that I've set up, though... They'll keep their randomly generated names, mostly out of laziness.

Names of Greek letters.

Alpha, Beta, Delta, Epsilon...

Star types, stellar objects, planet names, etc...

I've never thought about this, but now that you bring it to my attention I think I'd go with a combination of mineral-flower, so for example "tourmaline-calendula".
Also to automate that, I saw that there is this neat website perchance.org that you can use to construct random word generators, I'm wondering if there's an open source alternative though, that would be great

"People" names that are alliterative with the actual machine type. E.g. PeterPi, WillWhitebox, NancyNAS, LarryLePotato

Russian spacecraft and rockets.

Currently I have N1 as my home server and my desktop is Energia. I've previously had Proton and Soyuz etc.

All of my servers are named after characters from the Dragon Ball universe.

Don't recommend doing an 'obscured' naming scheme,, hate having to refer to a spreadsheet to know what server does what because I tend to spin up a lot of random stuff. Highly recommend using functional names that are easy for your brain to remember, like an acronym for whatever service or types of services it's running.

Just stupid puns that come to mind when I set it up. Synology NAS is "Rainy" since the box had "be your own cloud" written on it. M1 MacBook is "Apple Pie" because being ARM it's just a big Raspberry Pi right? Etc

Fun fact: When AOL was still operating in Germany, internal servers in their network were named after characters / things from Asterix comics, like Asterix, Obelix, Idefix, Miraculix and even Hinkelstein (menhir). When Telecom Italia bought them up they unfortunately got rid of all these and replaced them with standard corpo server names. Source: I worked there.

I used to work in the GRASP lab at Penn, and my predecessor there was John Bradley of xv fame. He had started naming all the machines after fish.

When I got there I continued the practice, naming some tiny computers being used for mini robots after different types of goldfish.

In my current job, years ago, I managed a group of Linux servers, and I named them after Demons (Lucifer, Asmodeus, Azrael, Beelzebub, etc.).

At this point, there is a specific naming convention in use where I'm at, and the name is limited to identifying organization, application, and server type.