One of my inventions, of which I was the most proud, was a server naming scheme I came up with at a previous employer. It was called the RFB scheme. We had a tradition in place of using rather tasteless humour for determining systemic nomenclatures. Previously, we'd employed a convention a friend of mine had suggested, using euphemisms for vomiting ( yak, ralph, hurl, chunder etc. ) but this had leaked up towards management who freaked that it might offend potential customers if the hostnames were somehow exposed, via mail headers or some such, and firmly suggested we change it to something tamer.
So we needed something innocuous, memorable, preferably with a payload of appropriately tasteless humour somehow opaque to everyone bar the tech ops. I remembered reading a list years previously, either on a BBS or USENET which I'd found morbidly amusing. Supposedly representative of a survey taken from Surgery magazine, of various objects removed from patients in emergency rooms, called the Rectal Foreign Bodies list. It was perfect, even coming with it's own snazzy sounding cryptic Three Letter Acronym. The RFB cluster was born.
This scheme was successfully deployed for a few years, I think without the management types ever cottoning on to just why these innocent, random sounding computer names used to elicit such childish smirking and nodding between members of their technical staff.
