Generally, we follow something along the lines of:

Development servers:  Roman/Greek Gods/Heroes/Monsters
Production:   Function names (ie:  www, smtp, etc...)
NT domain controllers:    location is used (ie:  mndc01)

Other conventions used in house are:

Popeye characters
Simpsons character
Looney Toons characters
Types of Peppers (ie:  chili, jabanero, etc)
British fictional characters (ie:  Holmes, Frodo, Morgana, Merlin, etc)
Various other names

Then, within DNS we setup three letter aliases for the servers by using typically the first three letters of the server name.  However, need to be careful as there are some 3 letter aliases that can be mistaken for commands or some systems could have same aliases.  Like if you have www1 and www2, but that's not too long to type.

Seems to work fairly well.  As to which system is which, once you get used to the names there's not mistaking what systems they are.

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