Yes, everyone has an opinion and everyone wants their opinion heard. Some people get much too passionate about naming. But in my experience, it's often been t

Yes, everyone has an opinion and everyone wants their opinion heard. Some people get much too passionate about naming. But in my experience, it's often been the people with the least vested interest who have the strongest opinions, and rather than 'calling bikeshed' the smart thing to do would be to identify the real stakeholders and get their opinions. If you have hundreds of servers, the team of sys admins using them every single day, who stand a good chance of connecting to all of them at least once in a year, should take priority over a manager who might refer to a small portion of them in conversation at a high level a few times per month or year. Someone who has to use server names in conversations with customers, investors, partners, and the like should take priority over a guy who wants to name production servers after his favorite porn stars. One solution is to simply declare bikeshed and pick an arbitrary scheme. I think in most cases that wouldn't be necessary if you muzzled the people who really should never have gotten involved in the discussion to begin with. It may be that once you get consensus on a few criteria (eg. no porn-star names) you may stall. That's when you declare bikeshed and pick something arbitrary that fits the criteria.