This was published as a feature article on NW Natural's corporate intranet

E T Call Home 

Brad Slaven is known as NW Natural’s Distributed Systems Administrator but his unofficial title could be movie maven and Information Systems naming guru.  In a world of mind boggling passwords and acronyms Brad and his IS cohorts have developed some very inventive ways to make the names of their equipment memorable to employees. Years ago Brad started naming printers after local rivers. Now he has to go much further to find names, which now include the Nile and the Euphrates rivers.

I.S names servers and controllers after movies that tie into the use of the equipment. For example, the general application server is called Patton, the locate server is called Holes, and the primary domain controller is called Diehard.  Groups who work with I.S help choose names. Schwartzaneggar movies set the tone for the equipment gas supply personnel use.

There is even hidden irony and social commentary in some of the names, such as Unbreakable for the test web server, Mean Streets for street level routing and Dr No for the mail filter, and Metropolis for the monitoring system. Thanks to the IS folk’s everyone can remember to use ET, the company’s radius server, to call in from home.

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