What is http://aries.fluther.com/?

i’ve been wondering that for a long time!

The name of one of the servers?

‘aries’ is probably the actual machine name of the host (or one of them) of fluther.com.

It’s one of our webservers.

The reason it has ads on is because you’re not logged in. Fluther is nice and does show ads (as many ads) to members. Must cost the guys a fortune.

@andrew, what’s a webserver, exactly?

how many servers is fluther on? – actually how much does fluther cost to maintain a month….unless thats classified ha

@andrew: What’s up with the naming scheme of your servers? I’ve seen some and they just seem…whimsical. No pattern I can think of.

Care to elaborate?

i think the next server you guys need you should have a contest and name it after a member….probably should just choose me but lets be fair about this

One of the cool attributes of a software development shop is that there is often fun to be had in the naming of such things as computers, printers, project nicknames, etc.

In one office I’ve worked in, we named the printers after planets, workstations after constellations, and projects after gemstones.

Rumour has it Microsoft has named pre-release software versions after cities, islands in the Puget Sound, and favorite restaurants of the developers.

@Grisson Apple named fonts after big cities.

One place I worked had servers named Yoda, Gandalf and Spock.

In my current job, we give servers dumb names like ‘DevSrv01’. However, I got to name my own workstation (nobody stopped me) so I have attempted to combine ‘chocolate’ and ‘computer’ in Italian and got cioccolatore which I translate loosely as ‘choculator’. At home my desktop computer is ‘Ordinateur’ and my laptop is ‘Ordinette’.

Its not just software development that has fun naming stuff. There is a “sonic hedgehog” gene and a “tiggy-winkle hedgehog” gene, both have important roles to play in the early foetal development process (or something).

Oh! And naming of new species. Those taxonomists have a great time!
I read in Science News a while back that there are beetle species named after John, Paul, George and Ringo.

At my current job, (we sell apple computers) we have called the file server “Fry”, the service server “Leela” and the backup server “Bender”

Dreamhost is a huge hosting company that names all of its servers something witty. Then when one goes down or they need to work on it they release a notice along the lines of -

Aquaman is sleeping with the fishes
Yoshi Licked
Hades burning!
Nitti’s gone all shi-well, you know.

I think it’s genius. They’ve taken something you would normally hate hearing or talking about and given it at least a little humor. The difference between those notices and a notice that “srv_container_116 is experiencing technical difficulties” is huge.

Sorry for the tangent, just wanted to give props.