Weird Project Codenames

At this point in my career I’ve encountered or been responsible for some interesting codename conventions applied to computing clusters or projects. I thought we could share…

At Xclaim, we (okay I) started naming our projects after various Twin Peaks characters (yeah, I’m one of those people) . So we had “The ARM” and “BOB”. “Man from Another Place” turned out to be just a little too abstruse. To be fair these projects had real-world analogs. So BOB stood for “book-of-business” and the ARM stood for “accounts receivable module”… at least officially anyway. The plan was to go on to Laura, Cooper, and — my personal favorite — Audrey.

At a previous gig the enterprise Unix boxes were named after monsters in the Godzilla universe: “Rodan”, “Mothra”, “Hydra”, etc. At yet another job the Unix machines were named after various synonyms for the word Dictator. I’m having a hard time remembering but the machine names “Despot” and “Warlord” spring to mind. A picture into the mind of your typical Unix administrator of the time!

This same shop named their Netware file server cluster after the cast of Gilligan’s Island.

What weird-ass codenames have you come across?