If you believe people can't get a little attached to "prodsys3" or whatever, then you underestimate the sentimentality of some of us. ;)

Of course, the other thing you can do is name server roles rather than specific hardware, so all of your servers are immortal, Ship-of-Theseus style.

A farmer gets attached to his cattle but when the time comes for one of them to go (either old age, to sell the meat, or there's a newer faster cattle that management has enforced a mandatory deadline of Q3 to migrate to), it's understood that it's time to say goodbye.

At one job, the servers were named after characters on Gilligan's Island.

Problems with Ginger were being discussed at one stand-up, and an engineer who didn't care about that quietly said, "Blah blah blah Ginger, blah blah blah Ginger." I almost fell over laughing.

(https://desertdemocrat.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/gary-lars...)

Yeah, I work for a CDN with tens of thousands of machines, and I still miss wac052.mad when we decommmed that POP 5 years ago.

prodsys3 pales in comparison to when I had to decommission gandalf and galadriel.

Now when name them by physical position in the rack/bladecenter.

At least the memes write themselves.

Every time someone trots out that old analogy, I think of my uncle who has a small dairy farm in the U.S. midwest with over 50 head of cattle. He gave each one a name, and when one is sick, he cares for it until it is better if possible.

I know of a man with over 50 children. I'm friendly with his neighbour, who has almost 40. 50 is a number that a human can still care for and love each one individually.

NB: Yes, I know that the Wikipedia list of "people with many children" makes 50 look like a record-breaking number. That list is Western-centric. Though 50 is a huge number of children even by Arab standards, it is not unheard of.

If you can have four wives, 50 children is only about 12/13 per wife, and 12/13 kids seems like a high-but-achievable number in our monogamous culture. So I find that very believable.

Right, because 50 is still a small enough number to care about each one. If he had 20,000....

It is also misguided. Not only do people get attached just as easily to meaningless identifiers, but when stripped of their mening people are more likely to re-use identifiers, not less.