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Server Naming Conventions?
The reader continues:
"Here's a few ideas we've been tossing around, using Joe's Deli as an example:
- [four letter "name"][two letter service type][2 numbers]
eg) jdelwb03.domain.com
+ easy to determine the function and name
- hard to remember and pronounce, once you run out of four
character servers, determining the name and function will be
difficult. Joe's Deli and John's Delivery will have conflicting
names
- [random combination of numbers and letters]
eg) ak1jop3d.domain.com
+ none really
- confusing.. really confusing. Can you imagine saying to someone
"log on to alpha kappa one john omikron peter three delta?"
- [theme based name]
name servers based on a theme, eg Gundam
eg) zaku.domain.com, gelgoog.domain.com
+ easily identifiable - all Gundam names belong to Joe's Deli,
easy to pronounce and remember
- hard for a new tech or management (why would they need to know?)
to associate to a server
"I'd like to know what others in the tech community use for server naming policies when planning large scale data centres. Also, with data centres located nationally, does the naming convention pose any problems? Thanks."
You could name them after the seven dwarfs, but then I'm not sure what you'd do with the other 3997?
I recommend a Sci-Fi theme. It's simple at first (pick an author/story and stick with it for a while) and can expand (how many different sco-fi movies/books/etc are there?). Comparatively, other things tend to run out when you expand. Plus, with Sci-Fi you can do exciting things like "All web servers will have robot names from Asimov". Something to think about.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I've always like the idea of naming your systems after your exec staff. Makes rebuilding them kinda fun - and if they're windos boxen - you know that at some point you'll get to reformat your CEO.
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
At my last job, we had ~40 machines in the low order of a class C. We named them after the elements in the periodic table. This gave us an easy naming scheme, and also served as a last-resort DNS system, as the last digit in the machine's IP number was the atomic weight of the element. It was pretty clever.
Name them after pop-stars. Hey, Britney is down again. N-Sync has crashed.
We have taken up Space Ghost names at work. Used to be Pinky and the Brain.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
This lets you distinguish between the server number in a rotation (the second element) and the specific service it is supporting (the first element).
I like to make my customers think... That's why I have echelon, bigbrother, etc. It's lot's of fun. I have learned to stay away from religious names though. I once had a baptist minister who wondered why a WHOIS on his domain showed his nameserver as Lucifer.
i've tended to use themes in the past. some of mine:
1) cities in Mexico
2) old video game characters
3) strange animals
simpsons character names are a common theme. at my current job, they name servers after old comedians (ollie, bud, lou) and give them aliases that sound more clinical. i.e. the nameserver has its colloquial name but it's also known as ns1.domain.com.
another place I worked at named servers after the latin form of volcano names, i.e. krakatoa, helena, etc.
- Josh
Why not just do subdomains (e.g. web01.joesdeli.domain.com)? Ease of use... ease of maintenance (due to seperated dns entries). Just plain easy :)
granted it's a 10 character convention, but still:
[2 letters] - data center
[3 letters] - group name
[2 letters] - service type (wb, sq, lb)
[3 characters] - server number (A01, A02)
it works pretty well. For something with only one datacenter you may try some sort of physical location indicator rather than a data center name like server row number. It makes it a heck of a lot easier when you need to physically track down a server.
Ad in classifieds: Pandora's Box (no box) $5
RFC 1178, Choosing a Name for Your Computer
Best Slashdot Co
use 128 bit UUIDs... no collision!
AD87D0A9S8D90A9D80AD90ASD8A0D80F0A80D8F0AASD3
if that isn't easy to remember I don't know what is!
At my old job we used to name all of our servers after Star Wars planets... I think there is an encyclopedia somewhere that has a couple hundred.
Heck, you could even name one "death-star" since that was sort of an artificial planet (moon, I know).
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
Server0001 through Server0200?
In my job we use countries, (nigeria, argentina, etc)
In my earlier job we used comic characters (obelix, asterix, etc)
oh, you want a useful convention, never used one.
Kilroy was here!
einstein
redford
lay
You can use any type of hall of fame, since new people are added each year or so, allowing for further expansion. So, baseball, football, basketball, teams for clusters, players for workstations, etc.
Wouldn't you like to be a pepper, too?
They were all aliased to their abbreviations, as well, so you didn't have to type the whole name. which got kind of old on some of them.
All of the computers on my network, about 3 or 4 most of the time are named for female ANIME characters. My personal machine is Ryoko, a Win98 machine is Akane, and my firewall is Armitage.
My company is an example of extremely stupid behavior. We have desktop machines named jsmithw2knyc. Anytime the machine is reassigned to another person, moved from office to office, or changes operating systems, the hostname and DNS must be updated. It's silly.
Name them after geographic features. You can group them by region (state, country, continent) and you have near infinite growth potential. You can name them after cities & towns, rivers & streams, mountains, lakes, etc.
It's the best naming convention I've seen yet.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
A while back while working as a consultant, routinely setting up file servers for different companies, I ran into the same problem. I solved it much the same way as proposed by you... (Company Initials/ Ticker + Location + Server Function + Server Number: IMICA-SLASH01, for example.) I found that naming servers after characters may prove to be nice for whomever did it, but in an arena where I would install and leave the poor saps on their own, it always helped tremendously to have a recognizable convention.
Name them all George. It might confuse hackers.
Alternatively, split them into 4+2+2, or 5+1+2. 5+1+2 is pretty versatile, project + code + number.
The trend seems to be going away from "real" names in the past 5-8 years... One customer of mine had all their printers named after Disney characters. I think the problem is keeping to themes; one place I worked had planets and moons for differnet types of boxes, but people started adding stars, or getting confused about what's a moon! It's also limiting in that after the 9th "planet-type" system, what do you do when you order 5 new servers? It may be possible to keep getting more obscure, but you lose the practicality which was the main purpose.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
For my little network at the home office I use the original (pre- annexation) names of streets in the neighborhood.
My wife thinks this is cool because she loves local history.
I think it's cool because I get to use names like maple, kuchle, liberty, newburgh, and columbus. Only the real old-timers from the hood get it. They enjoy knowing a little something about computers that younger people don't, even though it's totally non-technical.
As a practical matter, it's a nearly inexhaustible "theme" category; as you need more names, just reach out to a larger radius. In a decent-sized city you'll need a full Class C to max out the theme.
You can always just use whatever hostname seems logical, disable all the NetBIOS shit on the windows boxes, and then setup and internal DNS server to resolve the names.
This way you can create something more hierarchical and verbose.
Example:
# joe dehli's first workstation (ws)
jdehli1.ws.mydomain.com
# joe dehli's second workstation (ws)
jdehli2.ws.mydomain.com
# first mass-storage file server (srv)
files1.srv.mydomain.com
# second mass-storage file server (srv)
files2.srv.mydomain.com
You can even go so far as to use LDAP for resolution depending on what platforms you plan on supporting and what needs you have for this naming system.
Just some ideas.
Justin Dubs
The best one I ever saw was at the University of Delaware when I was an undergraduate. There was a roomfull of SPARC IPC's, all named after flavors of ice cream: strawberry.udel.edu, chocolate.udel.edu, vanilla.udel.edu, etc. The file server, of course, was named freezer.udel.edu.
Well, I thought it was kinda cute, anyway. Obviously you'd be hard pressed to come up with 4,000 flavors of ice cream. Most large sites I've consulted at use some variation on your first idea, e.g. site code + (function or department) + number.
just like the US postal service does.. split up areas with zip codes, and then sub divide those areas
At the company I work at, we have ~5000 servers worldwide, and they all follow the same naming convention:
Thus, a production server in Minneapolis, Minnesota would be usmnminpsnnn , or a development server in Vancouver, BC, would be cabcvandsnnn .
They that would sacrifice their
ChickenParmesan
SpicyThaiTofu
SuperBurrito
Note that chickenparmesan is the maximum length for a WFW filesharing system (I think, don't flame me.). Humor always has a place. Cartoon characters too.... Hmmmmm Voltron.
Anyways, just being a troll.
Muerte
our company used fish names!
trout, whale etc...
At $job[-2] we had about 200 hosts, give or take. Effectively, we did the name + number bit, becuase in our case, the servers were either standalone functionality (e.g. primedns.foo.com, secdns.foo.com, extwww.foo.com), or part of a large herd of machines doing the same thing: pbs001 .. pbs111 .. pbsXYZ (number cruncher machines running the pbs job batch control system). My advice to you is locate the "unique" machines, and give them names that strongly reflect their function on the network. The "herd members" you should give numeric names to (e.g. aix9999, fbsd3333, lnux2222, etc.) that also reflect the operating system being used (standardize the abbreviated os names, of course, nothing like wondering if 'dux' is a machine that quacks or a data general UX host). Keep an electronic (and paper!) record of what client is on which herd machine. I know the number thing seems a little impersonal, but how many anime series are there that can scale to several thousand host names? Even if you like war and peace, you'd run out after several hundred...
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
1st_post
2nd_post
3999th_post
That's 3993! You must have learned math from Cowboyneal. 4000 - 7 = 3997, they should put that in the next poll.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Perhaps it doesn't have the same geek appeal as sci-fi or anime, but where I work the servers are named after major cities across the world. I find this to be a better choice than something geeky because everybody knows the major world cities, and so the names are extremely easy for people to remember.
As an extra special bonus, it makes you feel like you're the president or something when you're having meetings about various world cities. Or at least.. uh.. it makes me feel that way.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
just name the servers after the *functions* they serve rather than a theme or other crap. :
for example
MR237BWEB01 - Mail Room number 237B Webserver 1.
CONF225FIL01 - Conference room 225 File Server 1.
EXTCOMPWEB01 - External Company web server 1.
alternatively you could also do the theme thing and assign some genre to a particular department.
for example, all accounting servers could be named after fish e.g. bluefish, haddock, trout, etc.
or colors or star wars themes or anything else.
i prefer the dept/room number/server type/server number scheme myself and using acronyms you could easily keep it under 8 characters for the host name.
Of course be sure to add the host names into a comma delimited file with an explanation and ip address/subnet and room location of the server (or rack location). Make sure you keep the file someplace publically accessible like on a webserver someplace.
:Peter
The problem with random combination of numbers and letters is that there's a finite number of possible names: 8^(26+10) of them. So I'd use one of the other schemes just to be sure.
why do you want to put all 4000 servers in the same domain? I don't keep 4000 files in the same directory. This is why we have sub domains.
I like to name my servers after greek gods. The man that wipes my shoes is called Ralph.
How about just using first names of people? They'd be easy to pronounce/remember, there's an effectively limitless supply to draw from (just get one of those "Name Your Baby" books), and you could even group servers topically (Joe's Deli gets Russian female names, John's Delivery gets African male names, etc).
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
We started with singers (elvis, lemmy, etc.), went conventional (cobalt1, host, etc.), and have now settled on computer names (trs80, vic20, rs6000, pdp11, etc.) which seems pretty cool and is good for loads of laughs on support calls ('My mail is hosted on a trs-80!?!').
An example I've seen used for a larger server farm. Looking at the layout of the server farm, they're usually aligned in rows and columns.
They had the name as such:
Row + Column + 4 letter name.
So, for the Joe's Deli example, which is in row 15 and column 20, you could have:
1520jdel.domain.com
You could also have:
Row + Column + 2 letter name + 2 letter service type
So for Joe's Deli again:
1520jdwb.domain.com
The downside is if you physically move the servers around, it can cause problems.
Casual Games/Downloads
At our ISP we've recently started rebuilding all of our servers. As we go, we're renaming them to character names from BSSM (Japanese vers. of Sailor Moon ) like: "makoto" or "usagi.XXXXX.com". Should be good for a while. :)
:)
In general, a genre of science fiction would tend to work, as scifi stories tend to have large numbers of "named things" in them for some reason. (Just thing of all the planets mentioned at some point in the Foundation series).
Famous literature is a good source as well. How about cluster of Caddy, Benjy, Jason, and Quentin? We'll be naming the "important boxes", ie a primary name server, after the author, with the backup or subsidary boxes named after characters in books they've written. It's a pretty easy method to come up with new names, and if you're an IB student you'll have no problem recognizing what cluster a specific machine belongs to
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
World Beers --> Fun to sample the potential names....
PHB "What do you think you're doing"
Lackey "Naming the servers sir, just 3500 more beers to go ..."
1. None at all. Good for security. A naming
convention is a nice shortcut when a script
kiddie is portscanning.
2. Naming conventions. (I.e. name the
Web server "Tolkein-Place-Names", the
mail server "Famous-Composers", et cetera.)
EXCELLENT IDEA! I think I might steal it. I started using the English spellings of Greek letters. Theres something funny about a box named mu.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
If you support a large number of offices like my I.T. group does (state government) the following method works great for us. All normal file servers in our system use this convention. The first two letters are always fs for file server followed by the first two letters of the city in which the server is located and then the first letter of the street it's located on. We add a few characters on the end for other internal tracking purposes, but this covers most of the important stuff. An example of this in use would be FSJAExxx with the x's being extra info. This system has worked great so far on the third largest network in Texas. I know this won't help the poster much, but maybe someone out there can use it.
Keep Austin Weird!
I know! Name them after characters in the Lord of the Rings. All your hax0r friends will think you are cool, hip, and original.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
First job of mine was with a national hosting firm, so they made a naming scheme that reflected geography, client, and series. For example:
customer-01.jfk.foo.net
Worked fairly well. We used the code for the closest airport for the geography portion. Also served to make dns adminning a mite prettier. Course that provides you're not against overly specific domain names. The '01' could also be replaced with significant letters for certain machines. customer-fw, for example, would be customer's firewall.
A more bureaucratic approach that we did at another job combined the theme idea with the department name. This works in a place where there are lot of computing divisions that have their own little kingdom of machines. Like where I work, we're known as "D0". Thus, we call our machines d0nut, d0mino, d0om, you get the idea.
We also have an unofficial series system that borrows on the idea, d0lx001 is d0's first linux node. Again, it works well for the scope it's been defined for.
I wager a nicely scalable system could be built using a combination of my two examples. If your machines have limits on hostname length, check on the limits of dns heirarchy. They may allow finer granularity.
For small organizations (under 20 machines, not counting workstations), theme oriented works just fine.
Our two W2K servers at work are named...brace yourself...fileserver and exchange. Fsck, might as well paint the whole building beige while they're at it.
At home, where I run the show, I like to use the names of Transformers characters, with Optimus being my Linux-based firewall/dhcp server/proxy.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
This gives you 5 chars for a name. And really do you need more than 1 char for use? w - web f - ftp d - database l - login etc.
you have (usually) 8 characters so make them count.
ie
3 for location
1 for os
1 for year of install (I know after 10 years it gets confusing)
3 for unique id (ie first initial, last initial, number)
for a canadian server running SunOS installed in 2001. cans1tc1
so when it shows up on the error log. you know which city, what support team to send out, etc.
the actual name gives you alot of information without having to look it up in the master table.
Later
i've used:
greek mythology (zeus, aphrodite, hades, etc)
DBZ characters (goku, gohan, vegeta, etc)
beastie boys song names (paulrevere, grasshopperunit, professorbooty, etc)
In each lab they usually used a theme based system (surprise, surprise). But each name had to have the first three letters be unique. Then the first three letters were entered as DNS aliases. This was extremely convenient! "telnet blahfoonarfzoinks" becomes "telnet bla".
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
My current home machines are named off of fantasy cities/lands, with the universe/world as the subdomain.
Another thing used at my workplace is having a cname for (machine #).(rack #).(server closet #).foo.bar Useful when you've tons of the same looking machines that don't move much.
At an isp I worked at previously their names were (use)(O-S)(##).(location ID).domain.com Like wwwbsd01.berlin01.******.com
My best recommendation is to have a 'proper' name for things, and a cname to something that's memorable for the people that need to work on the machine.
Larry Moe Curly Shemp
Of course, it doesn't scale well.
Stars (constellations, too)!
n ames.html
:-)
:: Imagine There's No Windows. It's Easy If You Try.
You could sort all of your company's machines into multiple bins based on which room they're in. Then, let's say you have two main rooms of machines -- one room will have machines with star or constellation names starting with A-K, the other, L-Z.
Here's a helpful listing: http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/~gibson/starnames/star
So, you would know automatically which room to head to if someone called for help saying that "Orion" just crashed
MONOLINUX
You're talking about different companies using your datacenter, so why not just let them pick? Of course, you will be the people who have to deal with the machines, but I'd leave it open to them. Of course, you would have a criteria for the naming.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Our company uses a very interesting naming convention - name it for the OS. Most of the servers are running NT, so they are named NTxxxx where NT is a progressive name. So you never know if you're copying to the right server or not. Who's to know that nt17 is the mail server? If it's a non-NT box, then it's named SVxxxx in another progressing fashion. Disclaimer: This was sarcasm. I in no way recommend actually using this type of thing.
You can use the names that we used tho it maked little sense. The NT boxes started with NT and then a number and the UNIX (Solaris) boxes where named sol and a number.
It was loads of fun to say. "sol024 is down again. Gods we are SOL now."
It is just a shame that the NT boxes are the ones that are down more.
Do NOT use cutesy names. (Homer, Marge, etc etc etc). That works fine when you've got a lab of a dozen machines. When you've got thousands it's silly and unmangeable. I know I don't expect I'll be able to remember where one our of 5000 hosts is just because the name is "mickeymouse". Imagine just how functional that is for somebody who's new to your NOC?
:) But with that many machines, the biggest problem you have is FINDING the machine when something goes wrong. My company here has a policy that we name machines after beaches --- "pismo" "waikiki" etc etc. Thats all fine and dandy..... until the someone starts screaming "WHO IS RUNNING HOST *LONGBEACH*??? YOU'RE SPEWING OUT CRAZY MULTICAST AND TRASHING THE NETWORK." Our host count is only in the low hundreds, but actually FINDING the offending machine is a big fat waste of time.
Personally I'd encode them using one or two characters to denote the platform ( i = intel, s = sun, h = hp, blah blah). Then use the additional characters to denote room, rack, etc etc. If you're allowed to use sub domains that makes your life much easier.
Maybe I'm over pragmatic
If you absolutely have/want to use 'friendly' names. Give your machines multiple names..... the pretty one, and the ugly sensible one so you can easily map between the two when you have to.
I hate to use it as an example --- but look at Hotmail when you log in. They are using subdomains and strict naming conventions for there servers. It's the only sensible thing to do..... unless you're trying to guarantee youself job security (and if thats the case and I was your boss and I found out i'd fire your ass for being a moron).
Okay Im a big literature dork (not a spelling dork) and I named all the servers based of characters from Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. Then, I used shakespeare characters (we had one box prown to crashing named Hamlet, god that killed me - Im a loser). After that to please my co-worker, we did a few steven king titles and then some Clancy. Those were the only modern literature relations - the rest were all classic literature but pretty random. Cervantes, Poe, Melvil, Orwell (1984 and AFarm were both there), and so many more. Book titles, famous characters, and authors were all game. We tried hard to associate the server type with the character if we could
We had fights with management wanting names like MAIL01, MAIL02, etc. but I bit them down when I told them that if one server type ever got above 100 then it would be a bitch or over 1000, etc.
Upper management liked the scheme cause when they would show clients the server rooms they would see these great literature references on the boxes which made us look inteligent. Win + Win.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
You could use planets but thats not enough. Why not use star names or constallations. For a list check out Here
HD-45348.domain.com7 174.domain.com
HD-172167.domain.com
SAO-06
HIC-30438.domain.com
Everybody loves stars
wiredog provides a link to the RFC for naming. Nice work.
Personally, I name my small network after mental disorders. My router is named paranoia, and my dual booting workstation is schzophrenia. Not that this helps any ;)
I know its boring, but why not use Hex or binary... 04X 02X 02X first for hex digits could be ranged to be various departments 0x00-0x100 accounting, etc second would be server type third could be anything.
and "Just think of all the planets..."
"preview" is a good thing
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
If you're feeling playful, how about: starsky, hutch, huggybear, kotter, fonzi, richie, potsie, baretta, oscar, felix, etc.
If not: myco0001, myco0002, etc.
You can always assign aliases for functional purposes: mail, news, www, ftp, etc.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Also, I have another client where the machines are named after planets, with the server being called THESUN, but one extremely annoying woman has URANUS.
Click here or here.
You should assign LOGICAL names to services, and then map them into actual hosts via CNAME records.
For example, we have our servers named after the characters from Cheers - norm, diane, cliff, lillith, etc.
We also have functional names - smtp, pop3, dns, etc.
Now, in the DNS records, we have:
smtp CNAME cliff
pop3 CNAME cliff
dns CNAME norm
As a result, the clients are configured to send mail to smtp, get mail from pop3, but that is mapped into cliff. If we move outbound mail to norm, we just change the cname.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'd suggest giving the major items their own names, so that they can be refered to by the staff easily.
For something like a cluster of servers for a single task, use a name to refer to the total, and numbers for the individual units.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
You have to have some FUN with it!! Hostnames are an extension of the system. Any real sysadmin picks up on a system's personality; a unique hostname only adds to that.
o w :-)
a ck (the backup server)
:-)
c orp.com
We have some servers named after function, i.e.
sales-prod0
sales-prod1
sales-prod2
I can't stand those. They're boring.
Then we have some named after things related to their function:
zuul
gozer
keymaster
(all firewalls)
OK, we're getting better...
Then we have some named after completely unrelated things:
who
what
idontknow
why
today
tomorr
(Those are E10k domains
Then we have other things named after children's books:
onefish
twofish
redfish
bluefish
Then we have cartoon characters:
boris
natasha
frostbitefalls
wayb
fred
barney
wilma
pebbles
bambam
Then we have the scifi stuff:
leguin
wintermute
asimov
And of course, no data center would be complete without Simpson characters:
homer
smithers
mr-burns
Of course, you could be like our west-coast data center and name your servers after mobsters...
The bottom line is that you need to have FUN with your hostnames! Besides that, it's better than naming your system important-financials-here.please-own-me.megaglobo
--NBVB
The more servers you get, the more it's helpful to have a name that helps you FIND the server.
At my old office, where we had regional servers, we had DHQNTA, DHQ19V, etc, that is Denver HQ, NT server A, 19 Vax, etc.
Currently, our 'rabbit farm' of NT servers (because the numbers keep growing by leaps and bounds) are named by service: SDevWeb01, SWeb, SMail, STestSQL01, etc.
S means it's a server, then Test Dev or Prod, plus a number if it's an actual server, or not if it's a cluster. Thus SWeb is the internal web cluster, but SWeb04 is one of the servers.
This works well if you've got two dozen servers or less...if you were Rackspace, I'd imagine naming the server after it's location on the rack, then pointing a DNS alias to it would be more helpful...pinging JoesBait&ISP is less helpful than pinging Rack014U14 when a NIC dies.
LABEL YOUR SERVERS! Nothing quite like using a console switch, pressing a reset button on the server underneath the console to reboot a dev box, only to realize you REALLY nuked a SIGNIFICANT portion of your enterprise File services!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Consider the namespace.
With 8 characters, you have over 20 million possibilities.. However, realistically memorable phrases under 8 characters is considerably less. Further, ones that fit a theme even more so..
Find a fiction element (movie, tv show, book, musician, songs, etc), and use character or element names from it.
Examples that easily scale to 4000 devices:
- Star wars: At an ISP I worked at, we used Star Wars. All Windows machines were named after elements from the Empire (of course), and all unixy systems were from the Rebels. Destroyer, AT-AT, Yoda, Obi, Dagobah, etc. There are literally tens of thousands of elements in the Star Wars universe to choose from.
- The Simpsons: At an unnamed enterprise class wireless provider, this is the de-facto naming convention. It truly has a limitless number of elements, with element combinations like lisassax (lisa's sax). Couple that with phrases "haveacow", and events "shotbrns"..
- Books by Stephen King: There just isnt a more prolific, and well known horror writer. Again, the elements make the naming convention robust.
As to your idea of including the function of the device, consider:
- Easier for bad guys to target which systems to attack
- New recruits will STILL have the learning curve (ns is obviously name serving, and db is obviously database, but who would guess that ae is auth database because ad was taken by active directory!!)
- Learning what each server is/does is BETTER for new admins anyways. Jumping in is not always a great thing, and having a solid memory connection to a server is DEEPLY helpful.
These are just based on my experience after 5 years in the industry. Personally, I name computers based on Piers Anthony's "Incarnations Of Immortality" although it wouldnt scale to 4000 elements.
There is something indescribably cool about being [root@evil root]#
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
For us (at a rather large IT company with an auto mfg as one of our clients) we use something along these lines. One of our servers would be named something like USCHINAWK009 where US is the country code, CHI is the city (use a nice abbreviation for whatever location you have), NAWK would be the specific application of the group of servers (say, W2KC for Windows 2000 Cluster or TIME if it's a time server, pick your own) and then the number is this server's serial in the group. This allows you to add servers at the same site that perform the same task by simply incrementing a number, and when you remove a server, the lower numebr just goes away. It works well, every server has a unique and recognizable name, the number is really easy to deal with as it's rare that you'd get too many servers at a site of each type. It's not pretty, it's not fancy, it doesn't have a cartoon character or elemental name, but it works. Well.
-Steve
I just heard about this great new nameing scheme. It is called base ten. Here is how it works: You call the first serve "1" and sequentialy name the rest until you get to "4000"
Easy - use Pokemon names. The damn little buggers aren't going to go away anytime soon, you have 251 to start with, and you know as profitable as they are that Nintendo is only going to invent more.
+ easy to determine the function and name
- hard to remember and pronounce, once you run out of four character servers, determining the name and function will be difficult. Joe's Deli and John's Delivery will have conflicting names
Why can't you just name them web.joesdeli.com and web.johnsdelivery.com?
i name all of mine after bodies of water. names like erie, rhine, rhone, nile, danube, eufaula (where the nick comes from - it was the first machine), etc...
what you could do if you had multpile locations is name them after geographical features of the area, like contients. (datacenter 1 = europe, datacenter 2 = north america, etc...), so, in one building you could have danube, elbe, volga, rhine, mtblanc, alps and so on. in another you could have erie, champlain, saltlake, pikespeak....this would probably get confusing after awhile. it works for us but we dont have anywhere near 4000 machines.
just my $0.02.....
I suppose I'll a wee bit constructive just in case the author really does need help...
And anyone that needs more than one computer to run Joe's Deli should be cast out.
And Hey! Since slashdot is written by the community, shouldn't we be able to put our OWN inline ads into our content? Why does taco and company get to put ads in my content?
This comment is Copyright 2002 by Jim Studt. It may not be altered or republished with advertisements without his express permission.
askjkj15 is worse than s951620 Put a-z as a zone and then digits! Only digits! Much easier!
This is my server Daryl and my other server Daryl.
Michael's 3 Rules of Device Taxonomy:
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Rather than having "horton-101-sd-ca-wd.domain.com", or worse yet: "hort101sdca.domain.com" it might be simpler to use the DNS heirarchy more completely.
Hostname "horton-101.sd.ca.domain.com" Especially for really large organizations geographically separated, or if you've got lots of separate clusters. Why dirty up your main address space when you can use "redhat01.cluster-12.domain.com"
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
You could name them after characters in the Simpsons.
Unfortunately, I doubt there are 4000 Simpsons characters, but hey, it's a start.
"Log in to Milhouse"
Who couldn't relate to a server named Homer?
Yeah, if you're the admin for the local chemistry geek's club. JAYsus.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
We name our servers after figures in Greek, Norse, Roman, etc. myths. Generally, they are chosen as an inside joke by our IT staff. Eg., our DNS/DHCP/Directory server is "odin", our DB server is "thor", and the previous file server in a troublesome branch offcie was "uranus". The new server we have for our most distant office (9-10 hour drive total) is named "erida".
For desktops/laptops, we use the city-name-abbreviation plus the asset number. No files are stored on the desks, there is very little call for connecting to them over the network.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I used to work for a L-A-R-G-E defense contractor and kept suggesting we name some of our servers "waste, fraud and abuse." This didn't go over well in some circles so I had to wait until I no longer worked there. My three home boxes though are now named "waste", "fraud" and "abuse." I ran into a similar problem when I added some additional hardware but these became "bend" and "fold". What I'll do after I add "spindle" and "mutilate" remains to be seen. I guess I'll see what some of the suggestions here are...
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
That post makes me wish there was a (-1: Stupid) score.
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
I belive this is the "Should I hang the toilet paper overhanded or underhanded" argument for the geek world.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
We put out a Request For Names to the group. Best pun, or most appropriate name wins. (There are several stages of voting to narrow down the list.) This way we avoid the constraints of other naming conventions, and servers are easier to remember. For example, our Omniback Cell management server is named Warden. And the server that manages our vehicle maintenance and parts database is named Tonka.
Sure, it's not the best name selection method for everybody. But it works well for us.
Why not give your servers a geo-political theme by naming them after countries that the Bush administration has fucked over?
Obviously, you start with Afghanistan (which, coincidentally, is first amongst all nations when they are placed alphabetically), and work your way through Iraq, North Korea, Russia, China and anyone else who doesn't salute the flag and sing "God Bless America" on demand.
Of course, as abandoning US support for even a modest international plan to tackle global warming and protect the environment (the Kyoto agreement) was one of the first thing that George W Bush did in office, he's really fucked them all. Including America.
But hey, after he's nuked everyone and they've nuked back, our children and our grandchildren won't need clean air to breathe will they?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Tootiek
Rhoda
Mork
Fonzie
Joanie
Chachi
Koja
Magnum
Willis
There's a lot of them, and fairly easy to remember.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I've found that when naming servers you can do what you're discussing, and name them by function and location, and that is the most useful naming onvention, as it tells you SOMETHING about the server right off the bat. On the other hand, with thousands of servers at your disposal (on an IP network I'd guess) these names will become, as you've said, repetitive. I'll usually cheese out and use Star Trek ships names (Federation ships, not all those damn alien species. Imagine naming a server Vor'cha). After those I'll use anime characters, scifi characters, etc. Someday I'll build a server named Rincewind, Ridcully, etc. The real point behind all of this is that with all these servers you're going to need a database somewhere to record things like maintenance history, purpose, access lists, contact info, client info, etc. If employees have easy access to this database then it does not really matter how you name them so long as the database is easily searchable. Or, you might want to go with a more detailed naming system. Name them by subdomain, IE web01.johnsdeli and web01.joesdelivery
In the past 20 years I have had to deal with this more times than I dare to count. Maybe my environs are more complex than most others but I have found that "cute" names get REAL old the third time that Bunny goes down ( :-) ) and you have NO idea which state the machine is in or how important this may be.
Therefore I have really taken a liking to the old boring but VERY effective naming convention of -
Where is something like dns,www,prx (proxy), bil (billing) etc...
is something like CaIrv050304
State, City, Row, Column, Machine from the bottom of the rack.
It's not sexy and does not provide the hours of entertainment but it sure is nice when crunch time comes.
Name them for what they do. Naming conventions like sci-fi or disney characters is cute but come on. What the heck does pluto.domain.com do.
,"internetftp", "db2". Then finally with a number "01", "02" and so on.
My company mainly has Windows NT/2000 servers with a few AIX and Linux servers mixed in. My department is called Enterprise Systems so all our servers start with "es" then we add what it does "internetweb"
A final name of one of our servers is "esdb201.domain.com" or "esinternetftp04.domain.com"
This way it is pretty easy to guess what the server does just by glancing at its name.
Any naming convention which uses themes, names, etc. is probably inappropriate for a company(eventually someone chooses a name someone is offended by), but more importantly it's very difficult to maintain for long term growth.
I would suggest coming up with a coding standard that provides the information you find valuable.
2 chars to define the OS or machine type
3 chars to define location
1 char for production or development
3 chars for a number sequence
So something like NTDFWP150 would be your 150th production NT server in Dallas. Maybe location isn't as important as purpose. Maybe you don't have development or production differentiation. I do think it's helpful for support staff to be able to tell what OS the machine is running by the machine name. If you are looking at 4000 servers at some point, then maybe 4-5 chars should be devoted to numbers.
Even though the name seems confusing, if you have a well defined pattern, it is trivial to train new staff. As far as linking this to customer names, you build a spreadsheet with a lookup table.
Give each machine a functional name with letter codes that break them down by OS/Function|Service/Location. By looking at a name you ought to be able to figure out what a machine does, what os it runs, and where it is at a glance.
On the other hand you need to be able to communicate these names to other people. Something Like NT-PDC-L1R5 can be rather cumbersome. To avoid this you can give the machine a memorable name as well. Like have all the mail servers named after composers. In addition to being easy to remember, you get to say things like, "Mozart needed a tuneup, so we pulled him out of the foundry and threw Bach in." Try to say that with a a coded name.
Idiot! Shut up!
You don't need to worry about someone determining your scheme and starting to hunt through your ports using the naming scheme.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
We used Brands of liquor. Every body knows them, you can group by types and there is almost an endless supply. HTH.
L053R
So when I named my servers, I just used Greek letters. Like delta, for the DNS server. Bla bla bla.
~Shane
Because at my site, the naming conventions are pretty sucky.
Hostnames were constructed to have a generic location code, a machine platform code, and then just a base10 number to indicate when it got in the queue to get a name.
But the location code is pretty stupid - like - we're all here in the same campus, right?
Likewise the platform codes got heavily bloated as soon as everything under the sun was a Wintel box.
I think there's still a good argument to be made for naming the box roughly according to functionality (assuming you're not exposed to the outside script kiddies), according to where the box is located (so you know where to go to get it fixed), what it is, and perhaps when you got or some easy-to-remember snippet of the internal property number or some such nonsense.
OTOH, maybe everyone would prefer to simply type "george" and know that it is a specific Dell Poweredge in the South machine room that runs Oracle.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Well, if these are going to be in a bunch of racks, name each rack with a 6 character name, and name each machine [rackname][Unit].domain.com. So if the system is in Unit1 of the the rack moocow, it's name would be moocow01.domain.com. That helps locate them quick too.
IMHO, that is...
For example, at a site I was at the networking group had a unique problem: They needed to name machines by building, and come up with some type of theme among them. Being the trekkies they had a Star Trek poster of some sort that listed all the different classes of ships, along with the names of individual ships. Each building was assigned a class, and the computers in that building were given names based on that class. For instance, my computer was "Kepler", and another one I remember was a "Copernicus".
Anyhow...YMMV and it sounds like you have many more machines to name, but you get the general idea.
Not to mention none of the users are gonna understand the reference anyway.
Far more logical to name as follows:
SRVR1
.
.
.
SRVR4000
It is a simple matter then to hand out a quick-reference pamphlet to your users defining what each server is.
Be sure to order the reference by server name, rather than function or department, as this is how they will be listed in Network Neighborhood. Your users cannot be expected to understand the difference between a print server and a SQL server anyway - no need to confuse them any more than necessary.
(and if you really do this I want a copy of your next performance review! rofl...)
At home I used to use the planets of the solar system. My router was a Sun SparcStation and it's name was sun (it was the one that all the other computers/planets revolved around). Each other computer was mercury, venus, earth, mars, etc.
:p.. just some suggestions.
Now I have my computers setup with the names of transformers.. rodimus, galvatron, megatron, optimus, etc
Here at work we use greek gods.. zeus, hermes, atlas, ares, nemesis, athena, pan, etc
Although those won't be very practical if you got a server-farm of 4000+ servers
At one point in our young company's early days, we noticed than half of the, then, 8 employees were named John. This led to the inside joke of naming all computers after famous Johns. The supply is nearly endless....
h midt (cnamed to jocob)
doe
candy
lithgow
belushijacobjingleheimersc
bonham
carmack
glenn
malkovich
...the list goes on and on...
I work for an AOL/TW subsidiary, (I'm really NOT evil, just no prospects out there right now!) and all our servers are named after Looney Tunes: Elmer, Bugs, Foghorn, etc. Except for the one sitting under MY desk. It's named Tux.
Try using babynames.com for ideas. Very inconspicious naming convection. Can't tell what the machine is used for, unless you're told. heh.
:)
For routers and switches though, keep it simple... i.e. - c7206-1.fe0.dnvr.core.domain.com - Yeah, it seems long but it's very discriptive. c7206-1 tells me it's the first cisco 7026, fe0 is obvious, it's in denver, on the core network. Simple and discriptive. or, jm160-1.hssi3.chi.border.domain.com... Guess what that is.
At home, I ditched both of my hostnames (my firewall & the web server have public IP's)...
They are now called Northtower and Southtower, in honor of those two big buildings that are missing from the view out my window.....
Let's never forget.
--NBVB
If, for example, you get new server boxes in and repurpose
MR237BWEB01 so that it's running the printers in the executive suite? Renaming a box is a bitch.
Best Slashdot Co
At the last company I worked for we used transformers as our naming convention. There are plenty of names available and you can get fairly creative with using the names:
All NT machines can be decepticons because they are evil, and all UNIX machines can be Autobots becuase they are friendly.
Your biggest UNIX machine can be Optimus and your biggest NT machine can be Megatron.
Your tape library can be Soundwave because he was the transformer that you put tapes into.
Your entire NOC can spend a fun filled afternoon debating naming decisions. It is a fun waste of time!
Where I work we use names from Old Norse mythology, and try t give the servers names that sort of match with their function.
:
;-)
A few examples
Our DNS servers are named
odin.ourdomain.com
mimer.ourdomain.com
since both Odin and Mimer where very wise charactors in the Norse mythology, and name servers are also in a way quite 'wise'.
Our firewall is named
fenris.ourdomain.com
after the Fenris wolf
Our webservers are named
udgaard.ourdomain.com
valhalla.ourdomain.com
since those two are names of places where a lot of people lived - and a lot of web-sites 'live' on the webservers.
Our dhcp server is
yggdrasil.ourdomain.com
since yggdrasil was the tree of life and the dhcp server hands out 'lives' in form of IP addresses to the client machines...
That should be enough examples to ensure you get the point of the scheeme
That scheeme is currently used on 30+ servers, and we still have a few good names left for some 10-15 more servers, but after that I think we'll have to suplement with a new scheeme - maybe we'll use roman gods or something similar...
In my undergraduate studies, we named our solaris boxes after famous mountains, i.e. whitney, olympus, hood, everest, etc. Kind of fun. Currently at work, we have a bunch of our higher profile boxes named after colors. Not sure what you would do with your large number of servers however.
I'm not sure I like the idea of having a convention. Say, for example, a hacker gets ahold of a security hole on machine test34.company.com. If there's a convention, what's to stop him from guessing what another machine on your net is? Just a thought. Creativity is my vote in this arena.
At my CS University, we named them after towns in our state - North Carolina: names like hendersonville, tryon, brevard, etc. When I graduated, they were phasing out the DECStations and they gave me one- tuxedo.cs.unca.edu!
I've used the following themes in the past:
Stars (of the galaxy, not crappy teen pop idols!)
Rivers
One-word song titles (subdomains make it easy to do longer song titles)
Where I work we give them names based on simpsons characters:
The linux/apache/postgresql/sendmail server is named Milhouse, because he's a bit of a nerd and is well-suited to boring mail delivery.
Nelson is the intranet server (apache/PHP/RH)
Wendell is the new intranet server - I figure he's smarter than Nelson, and the server is considerably better.
Martin is the IIS web server because I don't really like Martin, and neither do Milhouse, Nelson, or Wendell.
The Mission-critical app server is named Goldserv because it's only NT4 and doesn't deserve a good name.
The terminal server is termserv1 because somebody else installed it for us.
The Novell server is just boring old CSALB1 because it was set up before I started, and it just died! Hooray! sorta, if you ignore the data loss thing.
Of course, this doesn't work for a large number of servers. I just wanted to brag before some drunken jackass claimed ownership on Simpson-named servers.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
At work all the servers have unique names taken from geographical locations nearby (kongsberg, flesberg etc). All the workstations have a prefix based on the system and a number. My Ultra10 is called sun342, another guy (with a new Blade 1000) got sun432. The linux-boxes I use are called linux3 and linux4 (you can probably guess our primary platform :), sgi-boxes are called sgi1 etc. On the other hand, the Windows-boxes are called KDP12345 (I can't remember the name of my windows machine) and so-on. This is harder to remember, but usually you don't access other peoples windowsmachines.
At home I've named all my machines and other network-capable devices after Star Wars-characters. amidala (amiga), obiwan (playstation 2), r2d2 (pc laptop), bobafett (pc), yoda (pc), hansolo (sgi challenge s), palpatine (sgi indigo2), anakin (sgi o2) and luke (sun sparcstation 5). This works fine, especially since I've got the darkside.no domain. :)
Give each machine two names. One purely functional, one for fun and ease of reference.
I'd think there would be lots of benefit to having a functional naming scheme especially as the number of your boxes starts to grow.
Some thoughts I'd like to share:
What you name your server doesn't really matter, as long as you have some simply way to map its properties to its name. Having a database around in which the primary key is the hostname and the other columns represent things like location, service, etc. will help you manage these things much more easily.
Management wants to know more than you think they probably do. Back when I was managing servers on several continents, as they were in pairs, I gave them paired names (e.g. ren and stimpy, bonnie and clyde, etc.). It was cute, but as management was getting reports from these servers they were having difficulty keeping track of what they represented. I would often get asked "are bonnie and clyde in London or DC? I can't remember. Will you please make them easier for us to analyze?"
That said, take a good look at your organization and determine who will be analyzing the reports coming out of your servers and what management thinks is the most important thing to know about a server given only its hostname. Is it the location of the server in the racks? Is it the datacenter in which it's housed? Is it the customer to whom the server is leased?
Once you figure out that important bit of data, the rest is just a matter of taste. Here are some examples:
Geographical servers: use the 3-letter airport code, e.g. sfo01, sfo02, etc. If that's further divided by functions, use sfowXX (web), sfomXX (mail), etc.
Rack placement: use the rack number, side (if you're placing servers back to back), and slot location from the bottom up. Example: r17s6. If you're using geographical data centers, use the airport code, e.g. SFOr17s6.
Customer: give each customer a unique four-letter ID that's easy to remember. Granted, you may run into conflicts but some creative naming may help in the matter.
Michael Jackson and the Seven Dwarfs just went down...?
"Just tell him ya did it! That's what he wants to hear anyway..."
I once had a baptist minister who wondered why a WHOIS on his domain showed his nameserver as Lucifer.
:)
Sounds like something I saw on TV a while back. Ad for a gospel album or something otherwise extremely religious. Phone number, (and I shit you not) was 1-800-666-xxxx. So, being the conscientous citizen I was, I called said number and told the person who answered about the problem. She had no idea what to do about it, of course, as she was only paid to take orders.
However, the next time I saw the commercial, the phone number had changed.
All in a day's work. The wife and I had quite a laugh over it though. >:)
GIR: I'm going to sing the Doom song now. Doom doom doom doom doom doom de-doom doom doom doom doom doom doom...
Atomic weight? Wouldn't this give you duplicates or did you actually name all the isotopes?
What about the difference between Tritium and Helium-3 (both weight 3).
Hmm...
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Since we have many offices, and moving to a Windows 2000 AD Structure (don't need the flames... I argue all day till I run out of breath)
With this, we have already office locations, ie: since I am in Ottawa, Canada, I can use otton.domain.com
my 1st DC will be ottondc01.otton.domain.com
my mail server is ottonmail01.otton.domain.com, etc, etc. With the windows 2000 crap going in place, I'm still lucky to have a local linux DNS server where I will be useing it to map alias, so, any cartoon theme, or user box will be userid.localdomainstilused.com
I name my servers after Interplay's RPGs; Planescape, Neverwinter, Icewind, etc. This would likely not work particularly well for a 4,000 server setup. In a case like that, I would probably name by function (webserver, fileserver, DB, etc.) mixed with, perhaps, location on a server grid system. For example:
r6.c42.room21.db4 or something (meaning Row 6, Column 42, server room 21, database server number four)
Once you have that many servers, cute little names just become a pain in the ass.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
We started out with one open view server, which was named 'Nova' before I was involved, so I don't know how. But when the bigger and better server arrived, it was appropriately titled 'Supernova'. After we started doing a little development, we decided we needed a test box, but due to cut backs all we were allowed was an old x86 (an P233 or some piece of crap). So we named it 'Chevy Nova'.
I'm quite proud of my own personal naming convention though, because in our work environment (at an ISP), very often management will speak about specific servers at meetings. So I've taking to naming my boxes noises that handicapped people make, like "phnork" and "phnea".
I never get sick of listening to my manager tell our operations centre that I've made a new tool available to them on "phnooshipling".
----- sXe
The LIRR homepage is http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/lirr/. The LIRR is run by the MTA, which is located in NYC, which is a city in NY, which is located in the US. Perfect scheme, and a suprisingly decent application of DNS. Especially for government.
So why suffer with jdeli342.domain.com? Why not a.jdeli.domain.com, b.jdeli.domain.com, etc? In addition to allowing for easier delegation of services, you can set search orders in /etc/resolv.conf so you can simply type ``ssh b'' to hop from host a to host b. That's just golden.
Some other examples..
Mail Exchangers
Nameservers
Web servers
And so on. If you get to z, make the next one aa, and then ab, etc.
Also, functional names should not replace cute names. DNS allows you to assign more than one name to a machine. If a machine is repurposed for another ask, it should still be known by its unique cute name no matter where it goes. At the same time, a single host can have more than one functional name.
No reason barney.domain.com can't also be bc.web.domain.com and e.porn.domain.com. :)
A source of cute names? Oh, uhm, right now I use Roman empererors. There were tons of them.
If you had stuck with the word "answer" you would have been fine. But you had to try to look smart and look where that got you! Modded up as funny, while making a simple mistake yourself!
If I were clever, I would leave a clever comment here.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Creativity in naming is always fun. At my previous employer (an ISP named The Pond), all of our machines were named after something aquatic -- guppy was our mail server, walleye our firewall, I called my workstation nemo. At my current employer, the owner is a former helicopter jockey, so all our machines have chopper names -- cobra, huey, cheyenne, etc. The domain name I used for my personal stuff has to do with dogs, so I name my machines after famous canines -- right now I have toto, benji, and lassie, and the next one will be named either poppy (that was the name of director Tim Burton's chihuahua that starred in "Mars Attacks!") or laika (the first dog in space).
The possibilities are endless, so have some fun!
The problem with names that a lot of IT departments assign is that they are only "half-duplex" memorable in the WRONG direction. For example, you know that nydevbld3 is the third build server in the NY office development department, but you have NO easy way to remember which server is hosting your build (Was it nydevbld3 or njdevbld3 or nydevbld2?).
Use easy-to-spell, easy-to-remember names. Use characters in your favorite book, city names, people names, etc.
Man.. choosing server names.. subject of BIG debates :)
:)
We are currently undergoing a merger which requires us to unify with another site - we are starting from scratch with all our servers, so we get to pick a fresh naming convention. Gone are planets & space related items (Mars, Saturn, Halley, Hubble, Pluto..) and in are Greek Gods and related mythalogical(?) figures (Zeus, Hades, Castor & Pollux, Atlas).
I personally like the new scheme.. makes the systems sound important
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
A good friend of mine was told to pick an element for his machine name at one job, but of course all of the good elements were taken by that time. (Who the hell wants to be Boron, after all...)
What did he choose?
Immodium.
That still cracks me up - (thanks, Dave!)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
So you never have a problem remembering their names as with that girl in the restaurant last weekend. Why they have to have different names anyway. So just call them Mary as it should be and add a nice reminder to self about where you last saw the babe, as in MaryFromAccounting, MaryWebServing. You can make the reminders more complex just to help a bit, as in GorgeusMaryWebServing, PlainMaryWebServing.
we use loony tunes character names
Ave Molech Setting
He probably means the atomic number...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
(type)(alphanum) It creates a near endless supply of names depending on the function of the machine. (Type) = Server (SRV), Workstation (WRK), Mail Exchange (MLX), Login (LOG), etc, etc (Alphanumeric) = start at 00001 up to zzzzz example: 1st server is srv00001, 2nd server becomes srv00002...etc, etc. Workstations are wrk00001, wrk00002 to wrk99999, wrkaaaaa, wrkaaaab....etc, etc. Logical if nothing else.
With my luck, my box would end up being Ununnilium or Ununbium.
you may want to think about using a naming scheme that incorporates location as well. We have around 400 servrs now, and 33 racks of equipment. We use the following name scheme:
xxxRnnnSmm
where xxx is a designation for the datacenter. (we have 2 today. eg: va1, sf2, ny1. These just let us know what facility)
Rnnn is for the rack in which the server is located. we number all racks, so R230 or R193, etc.
Smm is for the server number. we count servers from the bottom and then name them accordingly. typically we have between 10-30 servers in a rack.
so a final server name might be:
ny1R130S27 - so that would signify our first NYC datacenter facility, Rack #130, 27th server from the bottom.
Additionally we numer all servers on a private network and NAT out from there. The server name is reflective of the IP as well. so we choose an arbitrary IP subnet of 10.22.128.0/17 and number from there. Assuming we number racks 128, 129, 130, 131, etc. we can reconstruct the IP from the server name, and the server name from the IP.
so ny1R130S27 would have IP 10.22.130.27
ny1R141S13 would have IP 10.22.141.13
IP 10.22.235.34 would be server name ny1R235S34
IP 10.22.207.11 would be server name ny1R207S11
Then we have a seperate database that links this server name with an account name/service name. Very handy for operations staff. and there is no possiblity of having the same name, or IP.
Just get a baby name book with wide margins... then as you plug servers in write what each server does next to the name that you've given it. Although a database would probably be easier I suppose....
Where I used to work we had way over 3000 servers (something like 2974 or so to be exact).
We are an ECN for the stock market and process information, we also have 2 other sister corps that we run servers for too.
What we did was name our server by
So for example our NY PDC belonging to the "XYZ Company" was called
XYZNY62PDC01
Now it looks like a complicated name, but if you tell people how to decipher it it is actually pretty simple and easy to know what and where the servers are.
Yes, it was a pain in the ass to begin with, but once people understood the naming convention, there was no problems at all - and in fact made it easier for us. We no longer had to see a server called GRYFFIN and wonder what the hell it did, before we actually logged in and had to look.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
I work for a small division in a large company. As soon as I started work there, I noticed that the guy who was naming all of the servers was doing it all wrong. He picked out the name EDUCATE for every server and simply appended a number to the end [EDUCATE63]. In other words, everything is named EDUCATE and you are forced to remember computers by a number. This defeats the whole point of having server names if you ask me.
This even came up at a meeting, but in the opposite way. Someone had taken it upon themselves to start naming servers after Star Wars characters, and one lady actually spoke out against it. I argued and said that this way we can actually start to identify computers around here instead of having to remember "Was it "EDUCATE68 or EDUCATE78?" No one in the room seemed to get it... We are now allowed to choose our own computer and server names, but I just thought that the original way this guy was doing it was, well, stupid.
I use the names of Chicago (the band) members for my home network of 8 machines. I know it sounds stupid but it gives my network some uniqueness.
Names:
Pankow, Lamm, Lee, Walt, Kath, Tris, Scheff, Champlin
What happens when I run out of member names you ask? Then I'll start with using the album names! (CTA, II, III, Live, V, VI...)
I know. I'm hopeless
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Gerty came first, she was as slow as a wet week.
Berty came next, he was faster & went to work.
Rafferty is the firewall
Liberty is the nameserver
Those who know of the A. W. Awdrey stories will
understand why my young son chose Thomas as his machines name.
The last place I worked used the names of planets that exploded in works of science fiction. After Praxis, Alderaan, and Earth, it became difficult to come up with new names.
Another place named servers after characters from the "Andy Griffith Show." It becomes difficult to distinguish between obscurely named machines, though. Opie? Mabel? Eunice?
Perhaps this should be a SlashDot Poll...
Yesterday it worked; today it is not working; Windows is like that...
My wife was expanding a lab with a preexisting "seven dwarves" naming scheme. So she invented some extra dwarves.
The two I remember were "sleazy" and "scuzzy".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You didn't specify where the servers where going to be (all on your LAN, or all over the world, services provided for one customer of for more) or what their functions are (only single task or mixed).
Put them in the DNS domain of the customer they're for. So for the customer bar division foo, you get foo.bar.customer.tld. If you, or the customer, doesn't want to do this, use your own domain. foo.bar.customer.yourdomain.tld.
If the machine (or a cluster) is for one project, call it project1, project2, project3.
Use cnames for specific functions. So cname the machine to pop for the POP-server, www for the web-server, sap for the SAP server. Also, use numbers if there are more than one.
Using the hostname only will not scale and not be clear who and what the machine is for. I have seen this in the past, it looks great in the beginning but when things are added/changed/removed you'll end up with dependencies you haven't thought about (And I didn't talk about the *users* yet).
bash$
No.
But that's because they *should* log onto Alpha Kilo One Juliet Omega Papa 3 Delta
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
You mean atomic number right? Or was 2 Deutronium? :) Yep... Deutronium is unstable, it crashed again last night. Something about Deutronium's configuration, I guess. Sounds like this guy needs to invent a few elements. He'll even make it to the coveted Unobtainium. (I wouldn't use this one in hopes that I could get that Quantum computer on the net.) I guess I'm odd for giving them a name based on their function (Web1, web2, db1, db2). My CSC dept. names their servers after birds( Eagle, Hawk, Ospre(doesn't help when you can't spell them)). A friend and I built a cluster, and named it chicken. We even printed a picture and put it on the front to make it easily identifiable.
:)
I like elements though, very clever!
Karma Clown
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
We name all our machines (servers & workstations) after Roman emperors. After 6 years, I'm only a quarter of the way through the list; when we run out of Roman emperors (if we all live that long), we'll move on to Egyption Pharoes and the emperors of India, China, and Japan. (We currently have 45 machines, and have retired a further 6.)
Two things:
First, the poster said he named them after the 'elements on the periodic table'. Isotopes are neither elements nor on the periodic table.
Second, I assume that the poster meant the atomic number (sequential integers from 1 to 111) and not atomic weight.
stipe42
In my house (we have around 20 computers...don't ask). To remember which one's we're talking about, I came up with a scheme that lets you know which one, and it's specs. The first letter is the brand of PC: D=Dell, M=Micron, C=Custom. then there's a number with the clock speed. So we have computers named D1800, M866 etc... This is still easy to remember and say, plus you can know the speed of it just from the name.
I manage about 300 and I'd have to say that function + number (ie: www132) is definately the easiest to remember. Beyond that we've written a php web based inventory application to keep track of which serers are assigned to which services. If I weren't concerned with my sanity; however, I'd love to use the names of lame ass former employees. Given the current economic downturn, there should be no shortage of material either. I could name most of ours twice.
To maintain one's geek cachét, naturally, you'd have a Kirk and a Spock, maybe a Picard and a Riker or a Janeway and a Chakotay (sp? guess I'm not a Trekker...), and so forth.
If you have too many boxen to name, you can start with Redshirt001, Redshirt002, etc.
The catch for these last, though, is that they have to be redundant and/or expendable. In other words, use 'em for development and staging, not production.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
Our QA guy names all of the machines after old TV shows.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Pokemon are the best thing to happen to host naming schemes in a decade.
Our little boxes that don't do anything real important are named after weak Pokemon: Caterpie is the Solaris jumpstart server, Pikachu is the console server, Nidorina and Nidorino are the pair of ftp servers.
Medium sized boxes with more prominent roles are named after more powerful Pokemon: a firewall is Eevee, one nameserver is Metapod, another is Beedrill.
Finally, our largest and most critical boxen are named after the most powerful and evolved Pokemon. The NetApp filers, an active-active pair clustered together around 2Tb of storage, are named Mew and Mewtwo. Our E3000 mail hub is called Electabuzz.
OK, so you've probably noticed that I don't follow the evolutionary model exactly right (Nidorino is a medium-strength Pokemon). But who cares. It's fun, the names are spelled mostly phonetically, are easy to say and type, and there are plenty of them.
There's even an online reference: The Pokedex. Does it get any better than this?
Edith Keeler Must Die
at a previous job, a file server crashed due to a power outage. We later found out that a squirrel climbed in a transformer box and was fried to squirrel hell along with our file server. We named the new file server "rocky" in rememberance of the squirrel.
So there you have it, a naming convention based on acts of god (and squirrels).
For my home lan, I prefer to name based on styles of beer. I've got dunkles, pilsner, porter, doppelbock (appropriate since it's a SMP machine).
He probably used the most common isotope of each element.
I'd recommend what several other people have already said - don't name machines for their intended purpose, as you get into trouble when you need to add, or remove, services + replace machines.
In the company where we work we have around 10 servers running Linux, or Windows, and around 50 desktop machines. Our system is to name desktop machines after rivers, and servers after oceans.
This system will scale upwards fairly well, (unless we suddenly acquire 1000 machines .. at which point we'll have more problems than naming systems.), and its simple to look at a list of machine names and see which ones are servers. Which is a huge win.
Once the machines have been named we setup aliases for all the servers, so we can have CNAMES for things like 'mailhost', 'newshost', 'exchange', 'exim', 'cvs', etc.
The only time we deviate from this system is for external machines, they're named pretty randomly - so we have Tigger, named after my cat, and Mordor after the holiday destination ;)
on various smaller networks, i've had the following naming schemes:
inky, blinky, pinky and clyde
mufasa, simba, puumba, timon, and rafiki
pooh and eeyore
bitchass and stankass
Easiest way to do this:
2
Joes Chicken Shack wants 3 web servers running win2k
JCSWEB001
JCSWEB002
etc.
W2KWEB001
W2kWEB00
or
JCSW2KWEB001
etc.
or you can use departments or if your company is huge and mulitnational and in different cities use the local airport
LAXWEB01
STLDNS05
etc.
This way you know:
1. What the machine is WEb, email, dns,etc.
2. where it is located
3. how many you have built.
using names, cartoons, and so forth leads to headaches and mess. IF you are going to do it, do it right...
I'm rather fond of theme based naming conventions, but they don't scale past 20 or 30 machines very well. For example, my home network is named after parts of a medeival castle/town. The main firewall is gatehouse. The machine I use to communicate with higher knowledge (ie browse the web) is cathedral, etc.
I like the periodic table idea, and using subdomains also seems like a good idea. Maybe TXT records too, if it's worth the trouble.
chris@xanadu:~$ whatis /.
/.: nothing appropriate.
I contracted at a place a few years ago that named their lan servers based on the location's phone area code (e.g., 313abc, 313xyz). Of course they started that naming convention when area codes were pretty static.
Well, they decided that it's most important to maintain that naming scheme, so as area codes changed, they updated server names. What fun!
Solution: they got bought out.
Thus sprach higg.
Why not use the names of M$ bugs. MS02-01, MS02-02...
The price of security is eternal vigilance.
Borrow from Latin classification. There is a 7 layer nested hierarchy (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) and all the names sound really cool.
google's directory to the rescue!
Devin
stuff |
Since my old company was spread out over the whole country, we used to name our severs by state, then by os, then simple incrementing digits. For example, a unix box in New York would be:
NYUnix04
Or an NT box in Jersey would be:
NJNT43
That was you get alot of info out of just the name. Hope that helps...
- Cheerios
Have a Happy.
Each CLLI code uses specific coding elements, described below:
1-Geographical code Typically assigned to cities, towns, international airports, military posts, or other specific geographical points. Typically characters 1-4 in CLLI. e.g. DNVR=Denver
2-Geopolitical code Typically a country, state, province, or other differentiator that, combined with the geographical code, forms a location identifier that is unique worldwide. Typically characters 5-6 in CLLI. e.g. CO=Colorado
3-Network site code This element is used with geographical and geopolitical codes to represent buildings, structures, enclosures or other locations at which there is a need to identify and describe one or more functional entities. Examples of network sites include central offices, relay buildings, controlled vaults, etc. Typically characters 7-8 in CLLI. e.g. 56=Central office Elm St.
4-Network-entity code Used with geographical, geopolitical, and network-site codes to identify and describe categories of equipment, functions of a particular group at a particular location, or type of maintenance center at a given location. Typically characters 9-11 in CLLI. e.g. DS0=Digital switch
5-Network support site code Used with geographical and geopolitical codes to identify and describe the location of international boundaries or crossing points, end points, fiber nodes, cable and facility junctions, manholes, poles, radio-equipment sites, repeaters and toll stations. Typically characters 7-11 in CLLI. e.g. P1234=Telephone pole
6-Customer site code This element can be used with geographical and geopolitical codes to identify and describe customer locations associated with switched-service networks, centrex installations, PBX equipment, military installations, university and hospital phone centers, etc. Typically characters 7-11 in CLLI. e.g. 1A101 = A customer
e.g. D N V R C O 5 6 D S 0
Everything changes: server location, server function, location names, etc.
I worked for a company that changed it's name 3 times in 1.5 years (a buyout and a spinoff - and yes it was stupid). We had servers that were named for company and division. It wasn't a big problem but it was annoying. I once inherited a server named for the application that it ran. The name of the application changed and people were confused.
I would choose something that's easy to remember (preferably pronounceable) but isn't related to anything about the server. I don't have too many servers to name right now so I used ski resorts. Yea, it's stupid but it's fun and it works for my situation. I think onomatopoeias would be fun but harder to dream up.
I think that in this case a formula is needed but it should not indicate any feature of the server. If possible the formula should simply generate pronounceable, memorable names.
I did some work for a customer who was setting up a data center in Hong Kong, and they named their servers after subway stations. When I complained about the opacity of this system, the response I got was "It makes perfect sense! All the app servers are on the same rail line!"
They did the same thing when they set up their UK center.
Scary - waking up in the middle of some emergency, and trying to remember what the different machines did caused much, much confusion.
If you name them after Michael Jordon's groupies you can probably grow upwards of 6,000 servers before you have problems. Of course he's getting divorced I think and so he should be up around 10,000 in no time...
--Richard
every good nerd knows them by hand... i mean heart.
Database machine (Dual 1.2ghz, 512MB, 80GB RAID Array, $6000 price tag): san francisco (it's big, ugly, and unnecessarily expensive)
Lotus Notes server that always seems to be broken: atlantic-city ('nuff said)
Printer: boston (first newspaper in america, but it's not as funny as the previous two :)
that's a space station....
When I attended Ball State University the new Unix lab was done using a simple scheme, the server was named WB, each workstation was a character in the show. So we were logged on to tweety, sylvester, taz, foghorn, bugs, daffy, yosemite, ect.
I heard one of the other departments was using a Trek theme, naming servers Picard, Kirk, Sulu, Spock...
A similar scheme might work for you, like mentioned in the Gundam example. But pick systems with lots of well known characters in each genre.
name them after senators/representatives. You can group them by states to help divide your zones
Our local server farm uses gene and/or phenotype names from the Drosophila genetics community, ie.
eyeless
wingless
tawny
notch
dregs
see http://flybase.bio.indiana.edu/genes/ for more
Another good theme seen in bioinformatics was for a linux cluster:
dolly1
dolly2
dolly3
dolly4
after the famous Scotts cloned sheep.
Ok, I've been having a pissy day and venting it on various web forums. But that reponse makes up for all of it. :-)
(For the clue impaired, note that the response is just an altered version of its parent.)
The most useful server naming resource on the net is probably The Dictionary of Arda.
I had worked in a large farm before - they name it by location/shelf/customer type. For example, company FOO's web server might be : fooweb2-3-4 (section 2 shelf 3 slot 4).
I manage a few dozen linux boxen here, and their names use a common reference frame, with individual idioms for different applications. i.e. database servers are planets/moons (Dagobah, Death Star), web servers are people (Anakin, Obi-wan, etc.) Basically, just use a common reference frame that's easily remembered. Trademark infringment is optional. :-)
At my old school we used names of elements on the periodic table; really helped me memorize them for chemistry.
At home/out business we use the name of the star trek ships eg: enterprise, nebula, defiant, and so on.
In college the various servers are named for local cities; Easy to remember.
... we use sort of a planetarian approach.
All main servers are named after suns (eg Sol),
secondary servers after planets (eg Terra),
third-level servers after planetoids (eg Moon),
and so on
Elements, not isotopes... Helium as oppose to Helium-3, Hydrogen as opposed to Tritium...
I have that at home. I thought I was clever too. Now to buy more PC's to use up all the names...
I made a list of elements with their atomic number, their two-letter abbreviations, and their dutch translation plus a perl script that makes the DNS zone files (forward and reverse)
magnesium IN A 10.4.0.12
ip12 IN CNAME magnesium
mg IN CNAME magnesium
It's public domain now... Get it all on one of my old web pages here
It uses the tld ".elements" (duh).
You need to change the perl script or zone files with a find-replace if your IP range is not 10.4.0.x though...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I hereby retract my mean comment.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I once worked for a company in Minnesota -- "The Land of Ten Thousand Lakes" -- with a group who preferred pronouncable names over cryptic acronyms. Their first few servers had been named after local lakes, and the convention stuck. It was certainly friendly and easy to use; for example, our main internet firewall and internal email server was Superior. I suppose, with a little advance planning, it would even be possible to map out the LAN connections using river names.
It reminded me of the story of a book collector who owned a large number of books on the US, but had trouble finding a satisfactory way to arrange them on his bookshelves. He tried alphabetical by author, by title, by state, even chronological by publishing date, and still couldn't quickly locate a particular book when needed. Until he hit on the idea of grouping his New England books on the upper-right shelves, his Southern books on the lower shelves, etc.
Don't underestimate the power of mnemonics!
Since we have many workers who were not born in the US, we prefer names that are easy for everyone to pronounce.
Lilliput is a good example
"Ah, herro. I am not able to be connecting to realreeput."
That's funny, I do exactly the same thing with my machines (this post from oxygen).
At work (where I'm the only sysadmin), our servers are named after the girls that I have slept with. We only have one server and it's not likely we're going to get another one for a loooooooong time.
In a well designed DNS zone (don't think of running more than ten hosts without a local DNS), you'll distinguish hosts from services. For example "imap.home.docsnyder.de" will always be my IMAP server, regardless of which machine is actually hosting it. So are "mail.home.docsnyder.de", "proxy.home.docsnyder.de", "gw.home.docsnyder.de" and so on. Of course you can point "imap.yourdomain.com" to several hosts, resulting in round-robin load-balancing.
.. r255" = 192.168.0.0 .. 192.168.0.255. Your DNS zone file will show one "$GENERATE" tag to assign A records to every host. Reverse-resolving is similarly easy.
.. m255 for mail servers, p0 .. p255 for proxies, w0 .. w255 (be careful not to create hex numbers, so use g..z for letters) for firewalls. On a really large (Class B or greater) network, you might use combined letter-number schemes, e. g. g3f22 or x55h3. Another advantage of the IP host part alias is its independency of the IP network part - you can change IP networks without affecting any hostnames (well, that's what hostnames and DNS zones should be for ;-)).
For actually assigning hostnames to hundreds or thousands of hosts, it's useful to take the IP host part of the _primary_ interface as an IP host part alias. For example (base and broadcast addresses included) "r0
If your network is larger than class C, use different letters. m0
For the use of "real" hostnames, set one or multiple CNAME tags in your DNS zone, maybe use it as your primary host name, as long as the IP host address alias will work.
Go to the Old Testament start in Genesis and just begat the one after the other. Plus you'll be among the few who have actually made it past all the begats.
I know at a certain place when they were replacing a bunch of VMS and Unix systems with Win2k machines, the admin named them all after sexually transmitted diseases... sphyllis.???.edu, clamidia.???.edu. it was funny, but the boss put a stop to it, especially since MS was supplying the hardware and software really cheaply...
---
I post links to stuff here
To my eyes, the (serious) comments here fall into two classes: naming strategies that are appropriate for a monolithic, centrally managed domain (i.e. one geek 'owns' the name space and can assign names like 'Fred' and 'Barney'); versus strategies that are appropriate for a large heterogeneous environment (i.e. subgroups of machines are managed independently, and named systematically like 'NY02TC23').
I think we can all agree that for a small- to medium-sized environment, themed names are fine because they're highly mnemonic, they're easy to distinguish when written, and you can probably see the nameplate/poster/whatever that's displayed near the chassis. But in larger contexts, like the multi-thousand server farm described, this approach quickly becomes unworkable. Instead, a systematic taxonomy is easier to use, in which names are predictable based on well-defined characteristics. This model is used by every large organization I've encountered (except for workgroup-level components, which are sometimes named and managed locally). Various good suggestions for structured naming are made here, all fairly similar, and all requiring as a first step identification of the key factors within your organization that are most useful for distinguishing your systems -- factors that won't tend to change over time as systems are upgraded, moved, etc. This varies from place to place.
It's important to remember that this is an attempt to map a complex name hierarchy into a small flat namespace. (I'm reminded of mapping long self-documenting variable names into old 6-byte or 8-byte names. Always painful.) So I liked the suggestion that perhaps individual machine names (as known to the OS, and subject to the worst restrictions) don't need to be globally unique, so long as their public representation always includes enough higher DNS-type qualifiers (e.g. "DFW02.admin01," distinct from "NYC04.admin01"). Again, it all depends on who will be maintaining and accessing these boxen, and, perhaps most importantly, who will be responsible for and gatekeeper of "the list" that defines the state of your universe. (But I'd say that calling up Fred in IT to get a server name, and having to live with whatever lame theme name he chooses, won't fly too well in many shops.)
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
We started out naming servers after prescription drug treatments for mental disorders. So we have zoloft, serax, xanax, lithium, and paxil. Then we moved onto drugs for treating fat people, like xenical. That was good, but we wanted something a little more racy, so we looked for drugs used for treating STDs, like zovirax and valtrex. But the best we've found so far are the treatments for IBS, like levsin, librax, and questran.
First, think about what's most important about the naming convention. With such a sizable amount of computers, being able to quickly find them would be my highest priority. There's no general solution for this, though. It all depends on where all these machines are being kept. If you've got a giant warehouse with just rows of servers all lined up, then the obvious solution is to give each row and each column a name, either a number or a letter. Just make sure you've got signs up in the warehouse letting you know what row and column you're at. Easy to pronounce, and kind of easy to remember. This is similar to the zipcode idea posted above.
Personally, I would break each area up into sections and then have each server have an easily recognizable name. So if you've got them split into groups of 25, or so, you could name each in the following way:
[area name/number]+[naming theme for that area]
So say someone decides to name all machines in group 17 after famous hollywood computers and robots, you might have 17HAL, 17ROBBIE, and 17WOPR (sp?). You've got easily recognizable names so if two machines are named blweb385 and blweb386 and then you've got two others named dlweb385 and dlweb386, it slows you down because you have to compare each character in the name as opposed to just looking for HAL or ROBBIE.
Personally, I find that naming machines after reproductive anatomy tends to make for interesting times. At one place I worked at, the sysadmin decided to name all the machines after members of NWA and Digital Underground. A friend of mine works with some guys who decided that all the web servers would be named after liquors and the workstations would be named after beers. I think the gateways and firewalls are named after mixed drinks.
The purpose of a machine changes quite a bit over the life of a server. For this reason, do NOT give the machine a name reflecant of it's purpose.
Instead, chose a simple series to pick names from (e.g. nobel prize winner, famous computer scientists, diseases, etc.).
Then give the machines CNAMEs reflectant of their purpose.
If a user needs to know which machine, give them the CNAME, not the real name. This will simply swapping machines out, temp. redirecting to another machine, handling hardware failures, etc. You also never run into the problem of figuring out appfoo.domain.com another admin is refering too ("Wait, did you mean replace the drive in the old appfoo or the new appfoo? Which box was that again?").
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
I'm sure that he meant atomic number, since atomic weights are non-integer, except for Carbon.
Personally, I favor naming them after scientists - this is what 95% of the world's laboratories in every field do. The two computers in my dad's lab are Watson and Crick (he doesn't even work with DNA). Substitute other sorts of famous people; presidents, athletes, whatever.
The anime characters are good, if that's what people in your group can remember. One lab I was in that had a lot of computers used deities; Linux were Hindu deities, NT were Greek, and Irix were Egyptian. We added a Mac (OS X) which I named Arawn (Welsh deity).
With 200 machines, you're gonna run out of pet names really fast, so I think you'd need to assign a whole new category of names to each busines, so Joe's Delivery could get Rolling Stones songs, and John's Delicatessen could get war criminals. That would be cool, and that way any administrative subdivisions could use naming conventions that they were good at remembering.
Oh! I have an idea, you could assign each company a word (Winter and Dog, say) and name every computer associated with that company that word, in a different language. All of the web-servers could be french (Hiver and Chien?), the POP servers spanish (Invierno and Perro) and so forth.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
probably not applicable here, but i've seen japanese naming scheme for machines, nice and short names like 'bo' ;-)
I had worked once for Extremely Dreadful Systems.
They had come in to outsource a government computers.
Computers named 'Voyager' became 'ADDS82GS1'
And crap like that.
Try to slot that into a conversation;
"The ADDS82GS1 needs a patch"
instaead of
"The Voyager needs a patch"
NEVER EVER USE CODES FOR HOSTNAMES.
Sounds good on paper and sounds good to the asset management mob.
YOU are going to be using the hostnames NOT them.
Name it something you can pronounce.
I use the names of famous Communist leaders:
mao, stalin, castro, etc.
Would work great for Linux or other Open Source OS machines.
I guess for the Windows machines you could use the names of famous capitalists:
jpmorgan, rockefeller, carnegie, gates, etc.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Solaris was made for naming machines after dead celebrities:
:)
marilyn {/usr/local} > ping elvis
elvis is alive
Also, this is a category that is sure to grow as the number of servers increases
Although, probably not at the same rate...
We break it down in to State, Site(city), Type, Number example: GAATLFP01 This breaks down as: GA= State, we use existing state codes, as in Georgia ATL= Site code or city, as in Atlanta FP= type of server, as in File and Print, "AS" would be Application Server 01= number of that server at that site, as in number one Torp
<FONT SIZE="2"><B>from the never-run-out-of-tolkien-characters dept.</B></FONT><BR> Some random reader sent in: <I>"Hi, I'm wondering what others out there use for server naming conventions. Our data centre right now houses a little under 200 servers, with plans to grow up to 4000 servers within the next five years. We'd like to pick something flexible and easy to manage with any tracking system. The servers we'll be implementing include SUN, HPUX, and AIX servers, in addition to existing Compaq and HP Intel servers, so we'll have to adhere to limitations placed on hostnames by manufacturers (ie HPUX lets you have an 8 character hostname)."</I> We had a similar story a <A HREF="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/28/ 1116250">few years ago</A>.
<P>
Now, don't that look better!
<a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/N2613.osdn/B9 60233.2;sz=336x280">
<img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/N2613.osdn/B9602 33.2;sz=336x280"></a>
Now, how 'bout an align=right in there, or some such...
Hey!
Where's my free subscription?
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I ran into the 8 character limit a few years back. Here's what we came up with for a convention. fnclnx01 First three letters for function of machine Second three letters for OS (w95, w2k, wnt, lnx, hpu, etc) Two numbers for designation should there be more than one server of that function ... we would subst letters for numbers when the machine was virtual (ie load balancing, clustering, etc).
It worked well for us. At a second company with multiple sites we omitted to OS designation in favour of a pre-determined city code (ie. Airport code).
Anti
I would use the actual GPS coordinates of the boxes! It couldn't be any simpler!
One thing you'll want to avoid for servers is location based names. You already can use DNS standards to specify locations, I.E., smtp.us.companyname.com will tell you the server is in the U.S. Do your users really care what closet or state the server is in? Probably not. A naming scheme based on location might work for workstations, but doesn't make sense for anything else.
e .com
e .com
We use the scheme of [service provided][two digit counter].country.companyname.com. The primary server of this service has an alias without a two digit code.
For example. A group of mail servers would be named:
mail01.us.companyname.com
mail02.us.companynam
mail03.us.companyname.com
With an alias for the primary server being:
mail.us.companyname.com
All development or testing servers don't use numbers but use letter as their counter. For example, mail development servers would be:
mail0a.us.companyname.com
mail0b.us.companynam
We've found this to be very effective as the name tells us 90% of what we want to know about the server, but doesn't overburden our administrators with having to remember hard to remember names. Plus, if you don't remember which server is the primary dns, ntp, or smtp server, you just type something like "dns.companyname.com" to get to the primary server. Development servers are also easily recognized.
At my work we use names from Dr. Who - stars for UNIX systems, planets for NT servers. With a television series that some lasted 33 years, there is quite a few names to choose from and plenty of web sources.
I think I read somewhere that the most common name for a computer on the Internet was frodo. We name our after mythological gods/people/places/beasts. ie dragon, excalibur, pegasus, sairys, rhiannon, galadriel, etc.
cmdrtaco, jonkatz, etc. would be good names
I worked at a major ISP as a Network engineer and had 600 machines over 14 geogrphic locations.
1. Subdomains
Pick a name per site that make sense. Lots of people use airport codes. That worked well for us. Sometimes though CHI is that much more readably then ORD (Ohare airport).
2. Easy descriptive names
www-001
www-002
Notice that this will sort correctly with that extra interger. Always assume that you will have more then 10 server of a particular kind.
3. More subdomains
service-001.customer.sub.domain.tld
4. Put it in writing
Tell staff they are not allowed to deviate from this. Ever.
5. Enforce DNS
Putting a machine on the network without DNS was written warning about the future of your job.
kashani
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
The atomic weight of carbon is 12.0107, and that's not an integer either.
Atomic weights are averages that are biased by the abundance of each isotope.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I heard of this BOFH guy who named his boxes "here", "there", "everywhere", "somewhere", "anywhere", and so on. So when users call him up and ask, "Where are my files?" He'll say "somewhere" and he means it! :-) Where did you keep my backup? Everywhere. You can only begin to imagine what else can come out from all this!
on the order of 4000 servers, the easiest thing to do would be to name the machine in the following fashion:
Make + last 2 segments of the machines IP.
So the HP/UX machine would be: hp220192.domain.com
This way you will be sure to have unique names, and something that is vaguely useful as well.
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
I have already paid for my sin, don't make it worse by modding my up.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I use Dragon Ball Z characters to name our servers ^_^
Many machines live there lives out in several roles. This produces the problem of migration. To get arround this problem all machines should have a "birth to death" name, this could be anything support wants it to be. Machines should also carry names for each service they run. Say you ran an oracle server and nis server on the machine "wibble". Perhaps one day we decide to move nis role to a dedicated machine. But can we ? yes but its hard because every appication has to be updated. Using the name wibble for the machine in a application is also bad because of when we migrate servers, the new machine also has to be called wibble. However having two machines named the same on the network can cause problems. Having names for service machines solves all of that. Services can be more to an other machine by just updating the DNS.
.... etc cos thats the service they are using, it might also be DNS2, However to you its Goofie, Setting up things so they see what the they thing the name of the server is has the addition advantage that when someone calls you and tells you the name of the machine, you know HOW they are trying to use it...
As to helpdesk, well there machines to them are called helpdesk1
For the complete solution use different VIPs for each service, that way even if people have hard coded IP addresses, everything works with migration.
James
0of10 3of103 7of9.
I name all of my machines after different constellations, basically anything dealing with space, goes will along with my SETI@Home initiative. My web server is Gemini, Mac is Orion, DNS is Capricorn, etc.
[function]-[hostnumber].[location].domain.foo
m ai n.foo
web-001.lax.domain.foo
smtp-001.lax.domain.foo
To tie groups of similar machines together in a group INSIDE of a geographic location (say a co-lo with multiple web farms) you could do:
[cluster]-[function]-[hostnumber].[location].do
c01-web-001.lax.domain.foo
Also note that hostnames can be different than DNS names, so you can have fun hostname (planets, trees, animals, etc) while still maintaining meaningful DNS hostnames.
When I was in school, it was easy to know where a server or Sun station was, depending on it's theme. I haven't been in school in six years, and I still remember that Dune characters were in the EE building, Disney characters were in the grad student computer lab, band instruments in the main lab, etc.
Think of it in terms of outlining. Put everything that goes together in one theme. Admittedly newbies might have a hard time, but a cheat sheet is easy, and they'll learn it all soon enough.
If you make the names have some kind of association, that might help the learning curves.
Joe's Deli - sandwhich names: club, reuben,tunamelt
US Midget Association - Sneezy, Dopey, Doc
etc, etc.
How about naming them after windows viruses?
nimda, codered, sircam, melissa...
Rest assured you'll never run out of names.
We do the same thing, except for the atomic number being the same as the last octet of the IP address. That's pretty clever.
For a larger domain, I'd pick the Hindu pantheon. You might run out of elements, but you'll never run out of Hindu gods.
Some of the other names we use are as follows:
egrep '^[A-Z][a-z][a-z][a-z]$'
(your dictionary path may vary) and use a selection (such as just place names: Alps, Asia, Bali, Boca, Bonn
Yes, associating them with something meaningful will be hard. There are other memory tricks for that. (The book mentioned above spends a little time discussing them, but that's not at all the point of the book.)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Where I work, The United States Institute of Peace, we have each of our printers named with the room number, and the name of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Mod point free since 2001
At my college, one of our labs had computer named after Sesame Street characters (which the students didn't like very much, I'm not sure why they were named that). They later got renamed to the names of counties in our state.
Maybe you could use something like the names of stars in the galaxy, or names of characters from a book (such as Lord of the Rings, I've seen servers named that way all over the net)
Smurfs are good to use as there's so many. Of course that only gets you a couple 1000. You could put them into Quadrants, talk about them as if they were in gangs...the Reds, Blues and so on. Then the head node of each grouping could be papa smurf. That kinda thing.
internet like monkeys'
They're a pain to manage manually, but if you've got a script/cgi interface to DNS they can make managing a large network much less painful.
I can tell you the meaning of life,
but you have to promise not to laugh.
Are you saying I'm unstable? :P
The atomic weight of the most common isotope of carbon is defined as exactly 12; no, naturally occuring carbon doesn't weigh that much, because of the natural abundance of C-13 and C-14.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
All hosts followed the convention (more or less) of company-or-function:1 + location-code:3 + system-type:1 + hex-number:3.
So, for example, bcarhd4b was an H/P (h) workstation in Ottawa (car), nwdcc1e2 was a router (c) in Calgary (wdc), mmlvd1c3 was a PC (d) in France (mlv), zmpkh040 was an H/P server (z) in California (mpk), crchyaae was an embedded system (y) in Texas (rch), &c.
Worked reasonably well since the master hosts file was controlled in effectivly one place (ensured no hostname conflicts) and once you knew the code, you could tell a lot from just the name (great for sysadmins.) Of course, the company changed names several times and location codes changed with business fortunes, so you had to learn over time things like mer == sky and bpd == enc.
Not a problem. Have the admin make a short name for your machine that corresponds to the symbol. I actually have to add a couple letters, because two character names aren't allowed. I just made some bash aliases like this:
1 68.8.8
alias sshpt='ssh platinum'
alias sshbe='ssh beryllium'
alias sshru='ssh rubidium'
and so on.
You could fixup the short names with a prefix like this:
ip-pt=192.168.8.78
ip-c=192.168.8.6
ip-o=192.
then you could do this:
telnet ip-pt
rather than typing out telnet platinum or telnet americium
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
At the university I went to, they named all the workstations and servers with food related names. The server was called "chef" and the workstations had names like carrot, potato, radish etc.
:-)
Of course, there's only so many vegetables. The sysadmin of that particular network was not only vegetarian but excrutiatingly politically correct. As the vegetable names ran short, I had to irritate him with my suggestions. Which were of course things like "steak", "bacon" and "veal"
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
We name our systems after the characters in our games. Of course, we only have four machines, so we've got a lot of names left. ^^
We have around 150 servers at present...
We have the initials of our company (we limites it to 2 characters I recommend that):
xy (ours happens to be CO)
Followed by d, p, or s:
d = development
p = production
s = staging
Followed by the platform:
Linux = lx
W2K = w2
NT = nt
Followed by the service it runs (or the primary service):
sql = SQL Server
apc = Apache
iis5 = IIS
iis4 = IIS
Then a 2 or 3 digit number:
00(0)
We end up with:
CODW2SQL01, COPLXAPC23, COSLXSQK02
Though I saw the 8 char limit on the name for HP
so I would chop the xy (co. initials) and maybe limit the service name to 2 chars each.
I like it and it makes life very easy.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
mov ax, 4c00h
int 21h
Result: terminate program under DOS, exit code 0.
Alex
Fear my assembly skills.
Each machine should have THREE names.
fw1, fw2, web1, web2 (first firewall, second firewall, first webserver, etc..)
dell1, dell2, compaq1, ibm1 (what it LOOKS like!)
pork, beef, yoda, jabba (toy name)
This way, you can refer to a machine by what it does, what it looks like, or a toyname in a theme. By setting up your zone files correctly, you should be able to easily map from one name to the other in order to use them all appropriately, and establish what they're doing.
Yea, I was thinking, "isn't Carbon 12.011" and lo and behold... One must remember weights are based off of the Carbon 12 atom (isotope), not the fact that the Carbon has weight 12.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Since this naming convention needs to scale nicely to thousands of boxen, you need a naming system that is structures and denotes geography rather than purpose.
I would number the rack cabinets and then assign a number or letter to each machine in the rack.
Subdomains make for a reasonably easy to organize larger scope (room, bldg, location, etc.) and allow you to circumvent some of the naming restrictions (e.g. 8 chars on hpux)
Thus, the third machine in the 3rd rack in room 5 of the phoenix data center could be something like...
R003M001.R5.PHXAZ.XYZZY.COM
In this system, there is never any question as to where a machine is or what to name it. It also gives you opportunities in methods to label your cables.
Just my two cents.
If you can't decide on a naming scheme that has all the info in the name that you want, perhaps implementing a web based database wouldn't be a terrible idea.
Give each server some name, but then make a database containing each server. Each entry would contain the server's name, IP(s), function, owner, physical location (datacenter and rack location), operating system, administrator (if necessary), who worked on it, what number it is on the console switch, and anything else you can think of.
The advantage of this is that you can have an endless supply of info about the server at your fingertips to ease in troubleshooting and finding the server. The database would also be accessible from anywhere with a web browser and network connectivity. You could even equip a PDA with a wireless ethernet card and get info from there. The database could even keep track of what work has been done on a server and who did it. If a network card gets replaced, you'd know who did it, to what server, and when. If something got changed, you'd know who did it (as long as they entered it in the database). Also, the database could keep track of what hardware is in each server. Data in a database is much easier to change than the name of the servers too, which is nice.
The disadvantage is mainly the added maintenance of the system. The software would have to be written, but really the software wouldn't need to be terribly complex: just a simple database with a simple frontend to enter, view, edit, and search data. The existing servers would need to be added to get it up and running which would take a bit of work, but then adding servers wouldn't be too bad. As long as the database was kept up to date the maintenance on it wouldn't be too bad. Also, the more stuff you keep track of in the database, the more difficult and time consuming it becomes to maintain the database.
It may sound clever at first glance, but ultimately such a naming scheme ends up becoming a nightmare. One should stick to the same principles in naming servers that one would adhere to in choosing primary keys for database tables. A good unique identifier is short, unlikely to change over time, and does not encode any additional information.
> - confusing.. really confusing. Can you imagine saying to someone "log on to alpha kappa one john omikron peter three delta?"
actually, thats
alpha kilo one juliet oscar papa three delta
Their top 100 host names from January 2002 can be found here. Care to wager what the top host name is? WWW of course...
A list of all their January 2002 surveys can be found here.
- [grunby]
W 4000 boxes, you should be able to come up with some logical groupings. One of the goals should be pronouncability so you don't have to spell out the names.
Why not a two- or three-letter syllable for the first name, a syllabic middle name, and numbers? Sort of like JDELWB88, but pronounceable: web-john-88, tip-joe-45? You could also consider incorporating the date-of-first-service as part of the server name.
All of the *nix machines could be people who are allied with the child of light and all of the *doze machines could be servants of Torak.
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
- Microsoft
- Sun
- IBM
- Xerox
- RedHat
Anyway, there's cruft in there (but the leading '.' cuts out a lot of "near misses".-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
first, with 4000 hosts you already know that you can throw out any system that names each server according to some mnemonic theme (rock stars, tolkein characters, etc). if you're running a data center of that scale chances are you've already learned the value of a "lights out" center, where all access is remote access. in this environment including things like rack numbers is probably pointless. think about who is accessing these machines, and how they refer to them. are you hosting this data center for outside clients? try starting with their company's name, stock ticker symbol, customer #, etc. if you're running a data center for one corporate entity, the users might differentiate them by user location, department, application, or OS. start the name with that bit of info the user most closely associates with the machine itself and work your way down the list. you are almost certainly going to need an incrementing uniqueness field (01, 02, etc) tacked onto the end.
of course, this is completely ignoring the political ramifications over host naming, where some depts (or worse yet, aquired companies) demand some differentiation of "their" boxen over everybody else's lowly systems....
At one place I worked all the machines were named after cheeses - Gouda, Parmesan, Swiss, Stilton, Feta, etc. My favorite was Head for the firewall. The only problem was when we added servers we'd spend an hour at cheese.com looking for a short cheese name that was easy to spell. It got pretty tough after a while.
Plus it must have done something to me subconsciously, because I'd often have cheese sandwiches for lunch.
Then I moved to some other random names, like claven for the mail server, and typesetter as the LPR server, lumberjack handles the syslogs, Floyd is the [fire]Wall, etc.
Three dits, four dits, two dits, dah!
Radio, radio, rah rah rah!
Can I see yourwifes rack???
I was poking around yourwifespubis and I found something that rubbed me the wrong way.....
--- /etc/bind/master/for/home.docsnyder.de
/. poll"
;^)
[...]
$GENERATE 1-254 cowboyneal A 192.168.0.$
cowboyneal TXT 1 "Today's
cowboyneal TXT 2 "Favorite hostname:"
cowboyneal TXT 3 "( ) homer"
cowboyneal TXT 4 "( ) linus"
cowboyneal TXT 5 "( ) neptune"
cowboyneal TXT 6 "( ) asterix"
cowboyneal TXT 7 "( ) cowboyneal"
---
$ host cowboyneal
cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.1
cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.2
cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.3
[...]
cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de A 192.168.0.254
$ dig cowboyneal.home.docsnyder.de txt
[you may guess...]
---
You'll always land on a box you might find useful.
P*rnst*rs
I started to count, but, as the list is over 685K.... :P
The stars would also do it (look around, someone posted a link to that).
-Greg
Really gets fun when you have backup interfaces, load balance interfaces, command and control interfaces, heart beat interfaces, etc, etc.. :)
:)
. dept.company.com
And then throw in clustering.
An example of a database machine
MNDB01 - main machine (Local host name also)
MNDB01a - failover interface
MNDB01b - Backup interface (We use 192.168.x.x for backup network only, you got 3 non-routable networks to use!)
MNDB01c - Control interface
MNDB01h - heartbeat interface (If clustered)
We use sun boxes with dual quad nic cards and 2 internal nics for 10 total)
MNDB02 - cluster server
MNDB11 - Complex 1, etc, get the idea.
We also use domain names
cc.work.com - command and control network, which we use for ssh/www/etc..
mndb01c.cc.work.com is only accessable from our secure desktop network for the network operation command center. Only way into the servers, this is your work network for maintence and configuration. It does not touch a production router.
All production servers that talk to the main DB will use MNDB01.production.work.com (Different Network!) All communications with the other servers use the production network, unless you have a dedicated network for this bandwidth. Sometimes good for syslog servers to log into 1 syslogd server.
I really like the idea of region addresses, but you can go really overboard. database01.location.valley.city.zip.state.carrier
Whew!
You've got 45 digits there. Assuming you are writing the number in hex (the usual convention), this would represent 180 bits, not 128. I assume that the "S" nybbles are typos.
1 DB8EF.
Or, the "S" nybbles might not be typos. You might be using base 29 or higher. Assuming base 29, your number represents 218 bits, which in hex would be written as 2334803DCEB50281BB372DC12D1665A8A52E51A9015ADC05A
Yes, I realize how ridiculous this is.
and name the servers and workstations the serial number of that machine.
Gawd the idiots that run the I.T. department have to be the stupidest on the planet... espically cince the Media-one merger....
It sounds complex when I write it all out like this, but it's really not. Every machine has two interfaces, the internal and external. Everything IP that is cluster facing is bound to the external interface, the internal interface is for adminstrative access only. Each interface is numbered and attached to a network that doesn't have a route to the other. :)
:)
Bearing all that in mind, this naming convention is fairly easy
- Each geo-location has a specific theme for hosts which is bound to their administrative (internal) interface. (Porn stars for the west coast, politicians for the east coast, beer for germany, football teams for the UK)
- Each cluster member within a geo-location has a role related (unfriendly) name in addition to it's friendly name.
- IP addresses that reverse to an unfriendly name are always bound to external interfaces.
- Routers have a unique theme across all geo-locations. (Super heroes)
- Routers have a non-friendly role related name.
- Switches have only a non-friendly name that directly relates to their geographic location. We just happen to use airport codes to identify location. SW-42-SFO-FL3 or some such. You aren't aren't going to touch these as often as other things.
- External reverse DNS always resolves to a non friendly name.
- Build your clusters around blocks of IPs, and pre-set your non-friendly names for the cluster members. Now you can repurpose boxes by simply binding new IPs to their external interfaces.
 Of course this can lead to a lot of unused space in the blocks you use on your cluster network, but you're using unroutable addresses there, right?
Karma: 0 (But I wield a mean +10 Vorpal Apathy)
Use hexadecimal for numbered parts. Two decimal digits is enough for enumerating 100 things, two hex digits is enough for 256.
Two, how about subdividing the domain name further: rather than servername.domainname.tld, try servername.subdomainname.domainname.tld.
e.g. web-0ff2.group-02.mycompany.com
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Hmmmm... mov ax,4c; int 21 -> exit program with error code 0. What does it have to do with fear?
as a fanboy otaku i can tell you its best to name all your machines after cutesey Japanese girl's names. ALL OF THEM. cause when they ping back, that means they really do love you, and no one can EVER take that away from you. ever. *snicker*
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I use names of planets in Elite. There are 255 planets per galaxy, and 8 galaxies = 2,040 names. One of the nice things about Elite planets is that there are many "pairs", ie. planets with similar names. These lend themselves for use by your twin mail servers, or your twin web servers, etc.
And they're all dead cool too. The only drawback is that some of them are hard to spell and pronounce.
Stuii!
Civil war battles work well for a mid-sized environment. Putting them into sub-domains works out rather easy as well. two major servers could start as Union and Confederate; then down to battles Gettysburg (a good http server name) Vicksburg; then into generals; Meade, Lee, Stonewall and Jackson could be two servers in the same room, Hood. Major historical events usually have a large number of available names and can be made reasonably logical.
The only downside to a civil war theme is that in a big enough company you'll eventually have a server named 'hooker'
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Half the people say run with it,
have fun with silly names. The
others must be managers, and
have complex substr formulas.
For the record, and those too lazy
too read the RFC's they pretty much
advocate the former.
I find foreign cities and words to be good.
Liege, Namur, Bruxelles...
deus...
My personal naming scheme
(dirty-bastard and db) is
unintenionally like my school's.
Long ass hyphenated names with
short acronyms e.g.
cathedral-seven -> c7,
magic-pi-ball -> mpb or pi.
Btw the theme here is hacks
[http://hacks.mit.edu/].
Were that I say, pancakes?
Rodents:
Lamentably, we ran out of rodents; using so many we almost broke the convention by moving to marsupials. Also, certain uptight folks we worked with also took umbrage to their machine being the RAT, BEAVER or (heaven forbid) GERBIL. Which gave rise to...
Invertebrate Meiofauna:
We could have grown forever with this convention, it's just that only one guy could come up with new ones. So we settled on...
Cheese:
But the best convention came from a crappy .com I worked for a few years ago:
Storied scientists:
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
As an aside, I just got a shiny new sparc workstation, and In keeping with the tree theme, I really really wanted to name it Morningwood. Good sense got the better of me.
--
"I'm don't know exactly what an AS/400 is, but I'm pretty certain I wouldn't want one up my ass" --Lou
is pretty simple. I run a network of several hundred servers, and I've split them into several logical groups: r0x0r.1.host.dom r0x0r.2.host.dom ...
31337.1.host.dom
31337.2.host.dom ...
and
HaX0r.1.host.dom
HaX0r.2.host.dom ....
name them after all the companies that went under. FINALLY a good use for :digital::convergance:!!
A 2-second peek in this very story provides some decent candidates:
(dumb lameness filter prevented a longer list)
Of course, these names don't follow any pattern which would reveal their use, but they could if you were selective about the names.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
My home network uses a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas naming scheme. I've got Duke, DrGonzo, SavageHenry, Lucy, Svend, LaSerta, Vegas (NAT Box), etc. And if I run out of names, I can always start using the contents of "the suitcase"
I name my servers after black project aircraft, like A-12, Oxcart, Blackbird, Have_Blue, D-21, M-12 and so on.
Why try to think of unique names when you can get other people to do it for you?!
could it be?
Mail Exchangers: a.mx.domain.com, b.mx.domain.com
I see "mx" and think "Mexico." Don't do that.
Will I retire or break 10K?
How about ancient gods? Firewall could be Xul, web server could be Freya, secret gaming box could be Odin, etc...
I started naming my systems after towns in the Final Fantasy series. I have nibelheim (the server that I put together on that day 5 (ok, really 2) years ago), Midgar, the workstation that was put together with the "midgar parts" I ordered online, and the laptop: esthar. I may eventually start naming the servers after characters. Cloud, Squall, Cecil, Vincent, Aeris, Zidane, Yang, Locke, Shadow, Celes... etc.
Another source of cutsey names that can (theoretically) serve a purpose are those of philosophers. For example, my P1-133 MP3 server box is named Thales, after the Greek philsopher with a fairly oversimplified view of the world: "All Is Water". I also have boxes named Nietzsche, Spinoza, Aristotle, Plato, etc. etc., each of which has some sort of tie-in with the name it has been given.
There's a fairly long list of philosophers here; more can easily be identified with a little bit of searching.
Regards,
levine
if you've got 4000 machines to administer, use the names of towns
That's a no-no. It could confuse clients into thinking that those machines serve those respective towns.
Will I retire or break 10K?
First of all, I'd recommend getting away from the idea that one name for one machine. Let aliases become your friend and use hostnames as a directory service:
where: w<building><floor><cube/rack id>
who: e<employee number> (workstations only)
what: s<service><project id>
support: c<support group><node id>
when: x<yy><mm><id> (lease expiry info)
Under this setup, one node may have the following names: wcam4c12, swebplan8, swebplan9, csys0004, x0209412 (or if it was a person's personal workstation, it might have e0101010 as another alias).
Now, if it moves, gets reassigned, gets a new role, gets supported by a different group, or gets a lease refresh, only one name (and possibly the ip) have to be changed, nothing else in any of the mount tables, lists, documentation. (and if you keep a convention of 8-letter names, you can use any other length of name safely for "fun" aliases)
It may seem like a lot of redundancy to set up, but don't forget: you need all this information anyway and this way you can use it right away in any script or config file without having to do an extra translation from some other id to a node/ip.
(ah for a network of my own...)
At my previous place of employment we had servers named after drugs.
One server was called crack, you would often hear "Is anyone using crack".
Wouldn't it be better to add a short CNAME for the machine?
Give them the same name as their hardware address. Sure, it will be ugly at first, but there are some great benefits. Setting up routers and debugging networking toubles will be a breeze since most swithches label the machine attached to each port by hardware address, not IP. Maintaining dhcp tables will also be much easier. Another benefit is the ability to tell which platform you are using just by the HW address, since each NIC manufacturer has their own block of MAC address space.
An internet company I have set up some systems for used car brands for their RS/6000 systems and animals for their SUN boxes. Nice idea for a smaller number of systems, and you can visualize a bit (elephant for a SUN 10k).
Too bad they didn't listen to my advice on names for some new systems. They missed out some great names:
weasel, cockroach, amoebe
lada, zastava, trabant
They thought their customers would not be amused... Doh!
Backenstoe Breen Burger Denton Dolan Donner Eddy Elliot Fosdick Foster Graves Halloran Handley Hardkoop Henderson Herron Hook James Keseberg Keyes McCutchen Miller Murphy Pike Reinhardt Reed Snyder Spitzer Stanton Trudeau Williams Wolfinger Zimmerman
Very obscure, and has high amusement potential.
I find naming computers after stars is a good way to go. There are billions of starts out there, aren't there? I'm sure you can find some online database out there using google.
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
I wanted to make fun of someone's mom and used :
'your_mom_ium'
The heaviest element of course....
just name them all Marklar
...I think I can explain this whole thing. Marklar, these marklars want to change your marklar. They don't want this marklar or any of these marklars to live here, because it's bad for their marklar. They use marklar to try and force marklars to believe their marklar. If you let them stay here, they will build marklars and marklars. They will take all your marklars and replace them with marklar. So, they must come here, to Marklar. Please, let these marklars stay where they can grow and prosper, without any marklars, marklars, or marklars!
KYLE (speaking in Marklar's language):
MARKLAR: Young marklar, your marklars are wise and true.
References
How about stock market ticker symbols? Usually only a few letters and there are thousands to choose from that can be easily remembered.
Personally I enjoy naming them after space objects..
Sol, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Belt, Jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune, pluto, titan, dactyl, epimetheus, hekadoncheries, pandora, galileo, voyager, alpha centauri..
Space is infinite, therefore so will your naming scheme. Of course there is a theoretical "Alpha Kappa Romeo Whiskey Tango One Niner" point
.
"Why, arent YOU the ladykiller?" "Aquitted!"
Using Roget's Thesaurus is one way to select a group of words around a theme.
If you speak another language (or even if you don't), especially if that language is a bit "exotic" or one of the "dead" languages, you have a rich source of host names.
Haven't seen anyone post this yet, but I'm naming my network after characters from The Lord of the Rings.
Central server is gandalf
Secondary is aragorn
etc.
I wouldn't try to quantify the number of names in the books, but I imagine you could name a 150-200 computers if you started consulting the historical material.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. -- George Orwell
The only current standard for identifying devices worldwide is common language location information. Born of the Bell System's need to track thousands of pieces of equipment from voice switches to satellites in orbit, it identifies a piece of equipment by city, state, country (inherant in the first two,) building, floor, lineup, bay, rack, shelf, slot, position...prety precise! Examples: the San Francisco tandem for all LATA 1 local and toll switching is SNFCCA2143T, a satellite in orbit would be STTLIO21N78, a DACS or router at a site would be OKLDCAANK35, how about the phone system at the White House: WASHDCWHDS0, etc... All of the information is maintained in a database run by Telcordia called CLONES...look into it, works tits!
Hope, Prosper, Frost, Italy, Paris, Gunbarrel, etc.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Why bother naming them? They never come when you call.
If you're on a dot com, or a start up, don't worry, you'll never get the chance to name 4000 boxes. :)
Doggie Style is also a beer from the Flying Dog litter :-)
If you REALLY think that you're going to deploy 4000 servers in the next few years, you'll need a practical naming scheme to keep track of them all. Sure, Star Wars characters and literary refrences are fun, but you'll quickly run out of good and meaningful names quickly. Good luck finding "Yoda96" when it needs to be rebooted! :)
Here's the naming convention that I use at work:
Two or 3 letter Department Abbreviation: Like HR, ACC, or PR
2 letters for type = Like DE for development, TE for testing, or PD for production
3 numbers for server number... 0 through 999.
So, the second Accounting development server would be accde002.domain.com. Keep the servers grouped together, and it makes things much easier to find.
What we've used:
iiijxyz
iii = High level function name. This is fairly arbitrary, but if you have JPD for Joe's Pizza Delivery, it's possible to have Jack's Pyrotechnic and Demolition, but unlikely. If you do collide, I'm sure you can come up with something anyway. You'll likely need a table lookup to be 100% sure that you're not giving info on one customer to another, so don't worry about collisions.
j = machine type. H is HP, I is IBM, S is Sun, C is Compaq, D is Dell, you get the idea. If you decie to have Alpha and Apple, then Alpha became either Compaq = C, Dell = D, or Samsung = S. If you collide, come up with something. Work on this table now. If you have more than 36 vendors (0-9, A-Z), just skip this step and polish the resume.
xyz is a descriptor of your network location, and really only makes sense to your staff. You really do want to know when an entire segment goes down, so if you get lots of 3c servers (3c5, 3c2, 3c9) calls, you know that you've lost something in your infrastructure. Sure, you have to rename if you move, but you DO have lots of flexibility there. They can be virtual, by the way-- if you happen to have 3c 3d on the same router (hopefully at least different switches), your staff who cares will know that c and d are shared.
Whatever you do, think about any predictable reprocussions you're doing, and will have to live with them.
Grub uses names of insects (bugs if you will) to name its computers. Among some of the names are, ant, roach, termite, muva (macedonian for fly), beetle, brainbug (ok that's not a bug, but you get it).
Naming your computers something fun should be a requirement!
Shameless plug, check out Grub!
I use names of cute anime girls :)
Currently I have the following,
209.50.23.33 - bea-router.xpurple.com
209.50.23.34 - airport.xpurple.com
209.50.23.35 - ami.xpurple.com
209.50.23.36 - lisa.xpurple.com
209.50.23.37 - sasami.xpurple.com
209.50.23.38 - tomoyo.xpurple.com
209.50.23.39 - rika.macphreak.org
209.50.23.40 - sakura.macphreak.org
209.50.23.41 - hikaru.macphreak.org
209.50.23.42 - nobuko.macphreak.org
209.50.23.43 - sae.macphreak.org
Note that the router, and airport don't follow this. But thier use will never change, so it doesn't matter.
http://www.xpurple.com
What about Playboy Playmates?
Just a thought.
Kent
At my University we have a special subnet for Networks class. During the course, students will write socket code and generally play around with TCP/IP stacks. Sometimes they get in over there head an the little subnet will meltdown.
The subnet is protected (well actually, I think it's more the Internet is protected from the subnet) with an OpenBSD box named Cerberus. It scrubs and aggressively filters the souls^h^h^h^h^hpackets that pass through it.
For those not up-to-date on their Roman and Greek mythology, Cerberus is the creature that guards the gates to hell.
The banner on the box reads:
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Every poster has ignored the actual question -- the system needs to be scalable (4,000 computers) and backwards compatible (8-letters long).
The 120 or so elements fail both tests (Praseodymium? 50% too big. And typical length.)
For the servers themselves, xxxxxYzz is the best system -- where xxxxx is the name of the company, Y a (capital, to make visual scanning easier) letter indicating the function of the server, and zz a number indicating its position in the group of type Y servers.
However, I don't see why you couldn't run a small internal DNS server (and make it accessible to your clients, if they are so inclined), to implement the other naming schemes.
sol.company -- jdeliA01.domain.com
terra.company -- jdeliB01.domain.com
Etc, etc. I only have experience on a smaller network -- 200 computers or so. 4000 is a *big*, *big* step up and requires a more systematic system to keep things simple.
+
Every year there's another crop of 200 or so.
Assigning John's Deli to all, say, fighting pokemons makes everything easy to remember.
-
Dorky.
eg. Continents for really big servers- the big guns, Countries for smaller ones, but still pretty big, then you could use states, and then towns.
For me my Main server is Africa. I then have things like Eqypt, RSA (Republic of South Africa) and various other things. The laptops etc. are Names like Cape Town, Durban, Cairo, etc.
It works pretty well, cause you get to categorise size and location. You could always add numbers at the end.
After you're done taking a deep breath, here are some server suggestions you might enjoy.
...
lithium valium prozac thorazine xanax paxil loxapine doxepin adapin cylert fluoxetine haldol klonopin navane primidone restoril triptil
Creep them out-
name your servers after guns or gun makers!
AK, Colt, Glock, Heckler (and Koch, of course), Kalashnikov, Ruger, Remington, Sig, Simonov...
C-X C-S
I've work at several diffrent location and shops and have seen quite a few ideas for naming conventions.
While I know most admins like the idea of naming servers after people or shows or characters, it really isn't a very useful system.
Who can always rember that BettyBoop.foo.com is the web server and Tarzan.boo.com is the DNS server......
I now work for one of the "Big 3" auto-makers in Detroit and we use a nice schemia that helps identify server, OS, location and services running on it:
1-3: Datacenter name
4-5: OS Type (hpux=hp, sun=su, Compaq=cp, etc)
6-7: Service name (web=wb, Databse=db, app-server=ap, etc)
8-10: 3 digit unique number. (use zeros to hold places for easier sorting.....)
So for example an Oracle Database running on a Sun 6500 in Germany might look like this:
niesudb093.for.bar.com
Sure the names un-pronouncable, but looking at it you immediately know basic info about the server.
Just my $0.02..........
Name them after their function, and number them.
Web servers:
WEB1
...
WEB5000
SQL servers:
SQL1
...
SQL5000
Advantages:
* Pronounceable and fairly easy to remember.
* Function of each server is obvious.
* More scalable than a theme-based convention.
* Easy to think up new names.
Disadvantages:
* Boring.
* No indication of which customer that server is assigned to. A simple database of server/customer assignments will allow someone to get this information easily as needed.
The point to remember when planning for thousands of servers is that the efficiency of *any* theme-based convention breaks down at some point. First, because it becomes more difficult to come up with new names in that theme. Second, because remembering the names and functions of all the machines becomes difficult. With 5000 machines, no suitable theme is likely to be found.
This suggestion is perhaps a bit bland and boring. However, remember that the theme you choose is likely to be with you for a while, and that you must work with the machines on a daily basis. If you had to find a machine in a hurry in a room with 5000 of them, would you find it quicker if it was SQL1885 (which is in the row of SQL1800's) or if it was named Bambi and it was in the row of Disney characters?
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Don't forget handwaveium.
Our machines are named after characters that've been played by Michael McKean: lenny (Laverne & Shirley), st-hubbins (Spinal Tap), vanderhoof (Best In Show), morris (the X-Files), and so on. He's such a bitchin' actor that we figured naming a small server farm after him was the least we could do. And when we run out of movies/TV shows that we remember him being in, there's always imdb.com...
I know this won't answer the question, but I've always wanted to put together a list of good computer names from the sci-fi world.
:-)
Here's what I've got so far:
Guardian, Colossus- Colossus: The Forbin Project
SkyNet- Terminator 2
HAL- 2001
WOPR- WarGames
Eddie- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I know I'm probably missing some good ones. Come on, slashgeeks, fill in the blanks!
~Philly
In my host file? Can I do that?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Two things: Yes, isotopes are in fact elements and they are on a sufficiently detailed periodic table; but then again I am about to get a master's degree in chemistry so what would I know?
Elgon
I used planetary names for my network at home, starting with 192.168.0.1 (Mercury - my server) and going out to 192.168.0.10 (Kuiper - laptop) That works great in a house with 5 pc's and sometimes 1 or 2 more. Obviously it wouldn't work with many more though . At point you'd have to give them names based off of function so you could identify them easily. Maybe something like mailserver01, accounting05. That's pretty much the only way to remember, and guess if needed, a system's name.
I know everyone loves witty names for the servers, but I remember one job I started as a developer, and having servers named by service was GREAT. I remember I was up and running in a day because the intranet portal was info.domain.com, cvs was on cvs.domain.com and imap was on mail.domain.com.
Naming servers by what they do just makes way too much sense. Of course, people can over confuse this. I remember a server called ATL-exch_01 and a bunch of names like that. Its alot harder to guess than mail or mail.atl. Domains are there for a reason, use them.
Serial numbers are pretty unique to each machine. They don't describe what the machine's job is so it's easy to reassign what it's doing.
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Erm...deuterium perhaps? Which is stable and hence not radioactive by the way.
Elgon
Short Location, Short Company ID, Function, Number.
The first exchange server for company widget located in DC would be DCWGEXCHANGE01.
Use 3 numbers if you'll ever have more than 10. Post sheets explaining company codes and/or location codes around the server room.
Nowhere near as fun, but so much less confusing.
The and name them after nuclei. The rule is that it should sound dirty. My three favourites are flocculus, fornix, and zona_incerta. We are still waiting for a machine suitable for Nucleus_O (a case with curves?).
--everytime you learn something a piece of your brain is replaced by something that someone else said
Start out with the basics, Homer Marge Bart Lisa Maggie, and expand as needed (Skinner Grandpa Selma Patty Lovejoy Flanders etc). There's a ton of them, and they're easy to remember, if you know the Simpsons.
Bonus: Good excuse to have marathon Simpson watch parties (the Season DVD's are in the process of coming out) for "training purposes" when you hire someone new.
It hurts when I pee.
I use the ancient greek gods. It allow you to impose a personality upon the user of the computer. For example, name the computer of the most "Attractive" female in the office Aphrodite. ;-)
You can also define namespaces based upon geographical areas in ancient Greece. (Olympus, Delphi...)
Things that are highly unstable at times, and perfectly stable at others(Windows) should be named things like Magnesium. Boxes that are relatively stable and mission critical(*nix) should be named after the inert gasses or stable metals. Of course, any machine running IIS should be named after a radioactive element. It deteriorates over time and Code Red will "nuke" your bandwidth...
Where I work they named servers after planets and stars. It seemed OK and appropriately nerdy, but then I found out that there was an old and frequently used server named Uranus. It wouldn't have been bad except for the day that we had an Network Engineer explaining DNS issues to a group and he kept talking about saying things like "I'm trying to ping Uranus and nothing's happening, but when I ping Uranus this way it works."
I had a hell of a time keeping a straight face, and some other people in the group completely lost it. Learn from their mistakes, make sure that your server names can't be interpreted in a kinky way.
Only recently i was pondering this. I was trying to remember the names of some of the servers i was an admin for. Although i'm based in Ireland one company had for example COR01a as a server name namely it was the first Banyan Vines server in our location, This got tricky as we ended up with about 20 Banyan servers. My most recent multi national employer originally US in origin and now wholly owned by a Danish company used a naming convention similar to your first example. For example SCOK01DB2 would stand for as follows:
S = Server
COK = Cork
DB = Database
2 = Second Server in database farm.
It did get a bit awkward if you came across the likes of SDUBDB2 as if your Irish you might think its in Dublin but since we had no servers in Dublin it had to be Dubai!!
Usually the first phase in breaking into a network is identifying all the clients, servers, interconnections, and functions. Names such as dns.jdeli.com, websrv.jdeli.com, or mail.jdeli.com.
Even worst are names that describe specific hardware or software features: iis.jdeli.com, linux.jdeli.com, Sparc5.jdeli.com
If you settle on a naming convetion that's easy for you to use, make sure it's also not easy for anyone unwanted to use either.
That being said, an elegant naming convention I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere here is the planets and moons. One implementation is [moon or surface feature].planet.jdeli.com: deimos.mars.jdeli.com, kepler.luna.jdeli.com
Moron is a good element too.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
are named after stuff from Tolkien lore.
Frodo, Gandolf, Bilbo, etc...
I figure when I run out of names (hah!), I can start using other stuff such as Lothlorien, Moria, etc.
Gotta love J.R.R.
One of the most simple I have found is
racknumber.unitplacement.domain.com
ie if it is rack 12 and the bottom of the server was at the 24U holes it would be
012.24u.domain.com
I knew a network admin who named all the computers, including clients, after astronomical features. He was apparently an astronomy buff, but I always figured that he thought if computers were named betelguese and other, even more confusing non-english words, he couldn't ever be fired.
Didn't work, though. He was replaced by an admin who has the sense to name computers with meaningful names, such as the first computer in the upper school lab (at a school) USL-1, the second USL-2, etc. Personally, I think a descriptive name is better, at least for everyone except a slimy network admin.
... according to places I've seen would go something like this:
... S399, S400.
10. Actual function (eg Mailman)
9. Famous scientists (Einstein)
8. Famous computer pioneers (Babbage)
7. Historical computers (Bombe)
6. Characters from Terry Pratchet Novels (Hodgesaargh)
5. Places, characters, technologies from Star Wars universe (Tosche)
4. Garden fruit/vegetables (Tomato)
3. Characters from Lord of the Rings (Gandalf)
2. Planets, stars, other celestial objects (Sol)
1. Whim of the sysadmin that particular day (Smeghead)
Of course, with 400 computers, perhaps you'd better just stick with S001, S002,
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
My computer names come from two groups the balance group and the disorder group.
:)
Balanace group:
yinyang, consonance
Disorder group:
chaos, discord
Another plus is if people see the names, they will usually have no clue what they mean
For you anime fans out there, this might be amusing.
In my last IT job, we had four new servers. I thought about what things of four I could name them, knowing full well that the situation could change.
I ended up naming them suzaku, seiryu, genbu, and byakko.
The firewall was -- of course -- tasuki. =) REKKA SHINEN those script kiddies....
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
At a college I attended for a while, one of the labs had a scheme of Star Wars and Star Trek character names. I remember there was a preiod of several weeks when the only two workstations that wouldn't behave and talk to each other were Darth Vader and Yoda.
Oh My God! You Killed Kenny!
You Bastard!
It's really a shame we could only give out the Timmay name to only one of the users though...
Oh yes, very clever. I'm sure no one has ever thought of that scheme before.
The way I do it. I have a X and a Y axis. I now have a valid horizontal location. A1 being the first through BC240 being the last one in our DC. The next digit represents the vertical location A-AM
So a1a.myserver.com is the first server on the first grid location bc240am.myserver.com will be the last server on the last grid location.
This works well for us.
Get a free ipod.
When I worked in the city of Columbus, we had three VAX servers and they were named: Nina, Pinta, and Santa_Maria.
Running out of names wasn't an issue because we knew we could never afford another VAX server anyway.
Don't forget about aliases.
Consider use a naming system that makes sense from the management point of view (e.g. HP002A3), but then create aliases (e.g. vanmail1) that make it easy for us humans to figure out.
This also comes in handing when you move systems for what ever reason, it just becomes a change in the DNS.
Where I work, the network guys named our servers after mythical gods. All the end-user machines are named after rocks. Not sure what they're trying to say...
I know this probably doesn't help with 3000 machines but since this is at the bottom, it won't get read anyway.
r ipper :)
margie
All of my hosts at home are named after Dr. Strangelove characters.
muffley
kong
strangelove
desadeski
kissov
mandrake (Debian box
guano (5x86 Win box)
At work I use Coen Bros. characters
lebowski
bunny
grimsrud
proudfoot
mikeyanagita
lundergaard
_.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._
ASCII art?? I thought it was a REGULAR expression
I'm sure you have hostnames assigned to the ports, or at least something like that. Where I work, we have a common convention of using the room # and the port #, prefixed by the department abbreviation. Since we have three buildings covered by our network, this helps a lot when tracking down network problems. For example, in the student services building, the ports are assigned like eecs-s300k001, for the department (eecs), room (s300k), and port (001)
Depends on the OS in question as to the length, but we have a fairly flexible and consistent convention we use at work. For Windows based OSs the length is 11 for legacy and non-windows systems it's 8. You can tell at a quick glance what the OS should be, the type of system and it's location.
Windows based Workstation OS
[OSID] + [Machine Type] + [Identifier - 3] + [Location]
Windows based Server OS
[OSID] + [Server Status] + [Server Type] + [Identifier - 2] + [Location]
Legacy/Non-Windows Systems
[OSID] + [Identifier - 3] + [Location]
Where [OSID] is one of {W95, W98, WNT, W2K, WXP, HP (for HPUX), IB (for IBM OS/390), TD (for Tandem)}
Where [Workstation Type] is one of {LT (for laptops), WS (for desktops)}
Where [Identifier] is any alphanumeric value of length indicated
Where [Server Status] is one of {P (for production), N (for nonproduction), T (for test), D (for development)}
Where [Server Type] is one of (FS {file server}, WW (web server), SQ (SQL), EX (Exchange), PR (Print Server), TS (Terminal Server), etc)
Where [Location] is a 3 character location code (normally closest major airport)
To misquote Churchill, never has an operating system (FreeBSD) used by so many been administered by so few. - NetCraft
What the fuck are you talking about?
Humans can usually corrolate orthagonal names to functions--vis, do you think "grep" has much to do with its function?
You will want to freeze names, however--if you use pepper names, banana.domain.com had better remain the mail server forever and chili.domain.com the HTTP server. If you move or replace machines, you can't go renaming stuff. People will pick up the names as fast as they would be able to sort out in their heads what "mo.mis.ht.23" is supposed to stand for.
Maintain a list, easily accessible to reference when you have a question--"bobafett is hosed... what does it do?"--and likely, the names will stick in the subconcious (if they are used often enough). Plus, john.domain.com is easier to type than ms.ja.web.domain.com.
Don't use apple names--there are fewer of them than you think, and Steve Jobs will reach through your Ethernet and throttle you.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Gotta remember that people come and go and something that indicates where the server is located will definitely help in trouble shooting.
m.mmm..myyy
how about 1 through 500
its expandable too.
..."honey, I've got two more servers coming in tomorrow. We'd better get to work thinking up more, um, names...."
In short, don't re-invent the wheel; subdomains exists specifically to adress this problem, and there's little sense in trying to cram all that information into a single, eight-character-or-less string.
With that many servers, why not name them after their street address (in the server room(s))? Then when one goes down on you, you'll be able to find it's physical location quickly.
And then the classic which is always fun,,,
on a Friday,,, after a few beers just before going home.
I cant ping uranus/i cant see uranus, I cant get into uranus, is uranus running? Storage space on uranus is full. I am booting uranus.
Then you can record your server names in book form in the US Copyright Office and sell each name for $50 or so.
Don't forget the IQ-8000 Holly from Red Dwarf. You know the head that tells the crew he has found something that will make their hairs stand on end.
Brylcreem
It's from season 8 episode 8. Terrible when you know these things by heart.
Help fight continental drift.
How about the names of anonymous and first posters on slashdot. There should be a limitless number of those.
My friend has made a habit of naming all of his computers names that start with the letters Re so far we have had:
Reliant
Resilient
Restless
Repressed
Repugnant
Redundant
and one other one that I can't remember
-----------------------------------------
Remove the Greed which plagues mankind.
At work here I use the Smurfs.
:)
Our router is called Papa, because it's kind of at the "top" of the tree for the Internet, I also chose Vanity, Grouchy, Brainy & Handy.. I used Gargamel for our mail server
I then gave them all CNAME's like 'mail' and 'intranet'.
The only time they see the real names, is when they do a lookup, which is fair enough.
s00001
s00002
s00003
s00004
...
For smaller class C networks, with 20-50 servers, I prefer to use the names of Waffen SS Divisions, such that the division number matches the IP address.
...
..
ie -
192.168.1.1 lah
192.168.1.2 dasreich
192.168.1.3 totenkopf
etc
For a larger LAN, of 4000+ machines, your best bet might be to use the names of Islamic Martyrs, complete with spaces and apostrophes. You can then alias the most popular command line utilities with arabic idioms
$ telnet gandalf
becomes
$ inshallah "Abu Sh'ham Alkebab"
When your fellow cube dwellers overhear you muttering commands to yourself in some endless litany, their petty little paranoias will fester until they call the Office of Homeland Security to have you arrested.
You can then sue your employer for workplace harrassment, and wrongful arrest.
All of our servers are named after things that are evil.
And then various other servers:
There's more I can't think of at the moment... It's always great fun coming up with names. We try to make them somehow relate to what they do, so that we know what they are without having to think about it.
Our old naming scheme was "deliberately hard to refer to", which we ended up having to get rid of because management couldn't tell what we were talking about. I'm not kidding. (server names like "everything", "everything-else", "nothing", "the-server", etc.) It was always fun when the conversation turned to "Hey, everything's down." "You mean everything everything, or just the server everything?" "Everything, and everything else, not the-server."
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Larry, Darryl, and Darryl.
When I worked there, all Intel systems were named by division
Commercial - begain w/ a
Consumer - b
Corporate - c
Credit - d
Intl. - e
Companywide - Z
Then they began counting from the right to left. For example "c2000000" so it was easy to say "C 2 million" It was actually very easy to remember.
As for the Unix systems. They were themed usually. The Tivoli servers were all spices.
Pepper, Salt, Clove, oregano etc. So any spice related server did something with tivoli. There were a lot of personal Sun workstations scattered around and they were themed by department. One dept all had them named after Fords. Cobra, Ranger, taurus etc... It was very easy.
I think he is reffering to his mad assembly skills. And you can put the little assembly program into memory and you should see the b8 yada yada as the interpreted assembly.
Staying away from 'geeky' naming conventions like LOTR, simpsons, anime, scifi stuff is good, because h4x0rs are more likely to recognize something like this, and probably won't know where their traps or glutes or deltoids are.
Organic compounds might also work (for a really really large server farm), but that would be hell to sort through.
Give your servers Hex/IP type names..
IE (00 through to 99) XX - (aa through to jj) XX - (short description like, Fil or Mai or App or Web etc) - fil
so you end up with 01acfil (server 1 room/section/building/state ac and file server) or 45gaweb (server 45 state ga web server)
Just make sure your good at documentation. *grin*
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Try including the hw platform and or model. Try to group servers in sub domains.
ent45001.web.foobar.com
ent45002.web.foobar.com
ent65001.db.foobar.com
ent45002.db.foobar.com
ult10001.snmp.foobar.com
ult10002.snmp.foobar.com
ent65001.backup.foobar.com
ent45002.backup.foobar.com
If you want to add location stuff too that is ok, but try to keep the names simple. 8 characters is fairly restricitive, so you may want to create an exception for the aix servers or whatever.
Also, mapping secondary names to the machines/apps will be useful, so ent45002.web.foobar.com might also be www1.foobar.com...
Forget about rack info if you want it to scale and have memorable names. ent45002.web.foobar.com can be remembered but e4us15a3 is just crazy.
If all you have is the machine name to find a server you have bigger problems, IMNSHO. Buy a program like Action Remedy (AR/Remedy) or just setup a webpage/db so people woth servers can add the info about their servers to a central location... Be sure to keep some kind of secondary copy (hard copy is better in case of network outage, you get the picture?)
If you have tons of info in the names, be sure to disallow ZONE TRANSFER on your dns or else you will be providing the ENEMY with a map to you network in a few minutes...
come up with standards for models, applications, numbering, etc. Refuse names like goofy, mickey, etc, or the whole thing will be much less useful.
i.e.:
Compaq = cpq
Sun = Sun
IBM = IBM
Sun Enterprise Server = Ent
I could go on, but you know the models you have and the abbrevs you'd like.
Allow 2 or 3 chars for numbering.
Create sub domains for each application:
web
db
ldap
smtp
make up ones to fit each application or hw-implemented app (loadbalancer/network filer, etc)...
Hope this helps. Be sure to SPAM everyone in your company, and hold open discussions, but come up with something fast, and make it COMPANY POLICY so admins have to follow it and rename their boxes if they don't follow it initially...
and name your network ports the same as the machine name... that helps too.
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
JUNK FOOD! We recently had to name our new clustered servers and everyone had their own ideas. We finally decided to use stars and planets. I prefered the naming conventions that UCSD used for their active directory implementation. Check out this AD topology link........ http://win2k.ucsd.edu/forest.html
Our network powers the Franklin Institute Science Museum. Since we are best known for our planetarium, I picked something that brings out the legacy of our organization with lots of room to grow. There are 80 registered constellations, and I figure if we run out of those we can move on to other astronomical bodies. (Our finance department's workstations are already named after the planets.)
So far we have:
Our coop has been naming some non-it computers after casinos. Again, the idea is to break up the lump of names into something meaningful.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I don't want to spoil everyone's fun, but we use pretty boring hostnames.. You'd think porn sites would be more interesting..
[company][id].[basedomain].[tld]
Voyeurweb, and it's associated sites are all
voy##.voyeurweb.com
When you have a bunch of machines, it makes it a lot easier.. There are some exceptions on our network, which make it difficult. When you're going through *EVERY* server on thet network making a change, it makes it a lot easier to delegate parts. For example, we upgraded every Unix server's sshd not too terribly long ago. It's easy enough to say "I'm doing 1 through 20, you do 21-40.". Imagine doing that by odd hostnames. Every element, famous comedians, pop rock groups?
There is a mistake in our planning though, but it's too late to fix it. We gave blocks of numbers to each city's colocation. So:
New York has 01-19
Tampa has 20-49
Frankfurt has 50-59
San Diego has 60-79
Los Angles has 80-99
But, what happens after we use up the 19 in NY or 29 in TPA. What seemed like an impossibility at the time has come pretty close to happening. We'll delegate another block,probably 1xx, 2xx, following the pattern of the previous block, so Tampa would gain 129-149 229-249, etc, etc..
What would have probably been better is [company][city][id]
voyNY01
voyTP01
voySD01
There are other companies that we host, which have their own short company delegation. We have more familiar hostnames that go with some of the machines, like ns, ns2, mail, etc, etc..
A company I used to work for had hostnames such as
gen
gen2
smart
stupid
free
ns
nic
noc
mail
alpha
Steak
KFC
At 3am, if you need to check every server for something, do you want to be trying to remember all the servers, or wonder which one you missed? If I don't remember what voy39 does, it's easy enough to look it up (intranets are your friend).
Numerical patterns can help too. If you have an APC masterswitch, you know it handles 8 machines. So, 1-8 are on the first, 9-16 on the second, 17-24 on the third, etc, etc.. Or even your network switches, if you were good about assinging ports. 1-48 on the first, 49-56 on the second..
If you have a small operation, names are cute. I've helped out friends who had all their machines named by function, pet-name, or person's name.. Not much help to me trying to figure out what's there. "Web, SQL, Laura, and Flower need x software upgraded, Rock, Stupid, and Mail need this, and check the rest for
Of course, nice numerically assigned machines give remote people a better understanding of your network too. if you want to break into a network, you find they have exactly four machines (server01-server04), you don't bother with all the other IP's, because you know they're just virtual hosts on the those machines.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
First of all, i missed my powernap for some irc (i know that's stupid, but why make life easier?), so excuse my bad language.
I guess you have some kind of inventory of all the servers (hostname, IP, daemons, uniqueid, guarantee and all other information needed).
Name them after OS and uniqueid, eg. SUN0234.
When some host goes down or need maintaince, it's easy to lookup what the hostname and IP are in the database (with ARS you can create nice case of them too). It's easy for the tech's to find out witch OS it is (an UNIX tech does NOT want to fix an NT and viceversa). Right tech on right server, you can also throw in some letters for what kind of server it is, eg. (capital for easier reading) SunWB233.
This idea maybe needs some adjustment, but i hope everyone gets the deal.
Thank you, I just hit an all time low when I just looked down at my dev machine I am at right now, realizing my machine's name. The label I happen to see upon the face...
BORON
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
I have absolutely no idea is I'm repeating someone else there's already way too many posts to this thread.
When you're naming 2 - 30 machines then it's time to have some fun. We had a bunch of machines at WPI named after Buckaroo Banzai. You could do interesting things running printjobs from a machine called realsoon.
Anywho, after so many machines I think it's more important for the names to start being meaningful to you. You'll be so busy trying to manage all of these machines that anything informative in a name will help.
So, my suggestion is to combine OS, date of installation, and some location coding into the name. You can offer CNames if people need to telnet into these machines and make them easy to find, but you'll need good information for the managers. Also, I'd invest some good money right now on monitoring and inventory tools.
Yeah, it's boring, but it's practical. If you find yourself managing 4,000+ machines then you're life will be exciting enough without funny names.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
that's what i do when i set up networks and have a bunch of servers to name. I've set up a lot of networks and haven't ran out of unique names yet.
Trust me... pick up a copy of Metamorphosis by Ovid. You'll probably find enough characters there to fill up your 4,000 servers. But if you don't, you can pick up a copy of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey and name your servers like Athena, Calypso, Circe, Penelope, etc.
Naming convention using anime, South Park, et. al. just screams with "juvenil, pimple-ridden geek!!" at your clients and/or co-workers. It may be good for few "hee ha", but it's gonna look awfully unprofessional.
Just an advice.
no
we've been using planet of the apes (original series) character names, btw.
Just *dont* use wierd but legal netbios allowed chars like underscores - works great in netbios but *dont* with bind - hope your downstream dns is tolerant...
We name all of our servers after StarTrek TNG characters
we have a programming lab, and we used different elements.... neon, platnium, uranium, and such and so forth. works well, and lots of choices... "go fix adamantium." excellent.
I dunno maybe we're afraid of being judged by our defecation
At my company, there are two sets of standards.
The first is the theme. All servers are named after cartoon characters. There is an almost inexhaustable supply, and it is very easy (after a bit of time) to associate a character with a server. "Sluggo" can be far easier to remember then PDCCV04. Especially late at night.
The second method is to take a three letter city or site abbreviation, follow that with a two letter application abbreviation, and follow that by two numbers (starting at 01). Utterly boring, impossible to remember.
But then again, management started to like the second method after I named some servers after Pokemon characters. It seems they have some embarassment when they have to describe to a vice president the problems that [i]Jigglypuff[/i] is having.
But people who work with the servers definately know which are which. And you can guess that Charizard might be a pretty powerful 24-way with 24gb of RAM [e10k domain].
Pokemon - gotta name them all!
American Indian tribes- the research for new names can be fascinating.I named network printers after famous chiefs (Geronimo, Cochise etc)
French wines - try to get the Americans to pronounce the names can be fun
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It sounds like you looking for a server naming convention staying within 8 chars and considering smart people never move server after being installed if they can at all help it (give me a good KVM solution that incluses USB or network booting and can do reinstalls and up from the console room) I would go with loc (that way they line up when sorted :) row rack and ru that translates into LLrrRRru so it's VAaa0142 for the first device in the VA facility row aa rack 01 in the bottom RU for a 42 ru rack, just right it says where the unit is so you can find it thats the imporant bit from netowrk and hardware monitoring I can realy care what it does that should be in the notes but in all reality thats trivial. Just start racking things and move on get them on the KVM and your gtg.
Create subdomains based upon server function. w.foo.com for web, f.foo.com for file services, d.foo.com for DNS, etc. Expand to two-digit subdomains, *.dx.foo.com or *.w9.foo.com if you need more.
Skip the themes for individual server names. You can use themes for DNS subdomains, but you don't need to actually name the "gemini" server group *.gemini.foo.com, but you can call the *.g.foo.com server group the gemini group.
You don't need to throw any reference to the operating system in the DNS name. If you replace a server with one from a different OS (like you migrate your database from HPUX to AS/400 or Linux), then you have to run around to several places and change the DNS name that other boxes point to. It also allows you to cluster mixed operating systems (good for reliability), and to transition from one OS to the other.
Finally, name your servers numerically as you add them to each sub-function group. Old servers that are slow and coming off lease soon will have lower numbers than higher ones. Just start with A0000001 for the first one in each domain, and go. If there are too many servers starting with A, then be slightly redundant and have the first letter of the server name match the single-letter subdomain. The first DNS server would be d00000001.d.foo.com.
I work in a very large computing environment with well over 15k servers. MF, UNIXen, win32, and almost every other proprietary POSC you can think of. ..... When the first server arrived, it was around lunch time as I was performing the network configuration. I had a burrito for lunch that day.
The use of subdomains is critical for organization, and state, but you also need to track test, development, production, and disaster recovery servers.
And don't forget all the routers and other network devices too. They need a naming convention that doesn't conflict with the servers.
Don't fall into the traps of using any part of an IP address in the name or allowing the end users to select the hostname. Definitely let them choose the DNS aliases which can be on different domains.
Something like:
XXAAAZZT
where
XX is the state or data center
AAA is the application or organization
ZZ is a number (00, 01, 02, 03)
T is the type (Production, Development, Test, DR)
Clear as mud? This is just for the hostnames, DNS aliases are completely different. This scheme supports domains or partitions via the numbering.
Being cute with themes simply won't work in a large scale environment. Standard naming conventions are required.
Although I remember with fondness my old mexican food motif servers: burrito, enchilada, guacamoli, fajita, jalapeno
Recently, my lesbian boss became pregnant. Don't worry, I didn't ask.
e
I'm the person who always names the kids in our deparment before they're born, sort of like when you code name a project. For example, I named the son of one coworker (I'll call him Ken) "Baby Chewbacca".
But Ken's wife is pregnant again, and my boss is having twins, so I had to come up with a new way to name everything, and it goes a little something like this:
-In programs, variables are named from the book "1001 Baby Names"
struct candice (
int terry;
float timmy;
char sam[30];
bool jennifer;
) ann-marie[100];
-Babies are named from the OpenVMS password generator:
muldedie
nicatway
worrawic
prigence
pillenn
metypnot
nobilers
crignies
-Servers are named after *former* employees. That way, then they depreciate in 2-3 years, you get to get rid of them AGAIN!
Seriously, this is what I've leaned:
-Servers named after famous computer people (Babbage, Hollerith, Turning, Hopper, etc) always break.
-Servers named after their function (Helpdesk, Development1, Payroll) always get reallocated to do something else, resulting in the "adverb-errata" (New_Helpdesk, Current_Development, Payroll_Prime)
What we do is name the server whatever the hell we want (we just got 3 Sun V880s we've named fooEarth, fooWind, and fooFire) and then we CNAME them in DNS to their function (helpdesk.domain.org, development.domain.org, payroll.domain.org). That way, no one is ever dependant on the name if we decide to change it. We've even started abstacting services on the same box.
Whatever you do, don't call your server "late_to_dinner.domain.com", that would be rude.
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen
Name the Rows (and columns) like street names. Then number them like houses. So you could say... there's a problem at "321 Hall Road, Located at the corner of Hall and Garfield Rd." Etc.. It'd be an easy way to find servers...
Quadaphi, Kahdafee, Cadaffee...
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
here's an easy idea.
why not just use a namescheme similar to this one:
[service]+[number of sys].[accountholder].domain.com
i.e.
web01.mystore.domain.com
if you have more than one service just map more than one fqdn to the same machine.
-and-
if you want one specific hostname for each machine plus the above, just use something like this:
system01.mystore.domain.com
it's just that easy!
If you are 22 or 23, you do not know shit. Get a job, a family, and a PHD---in that order; then you may know something.
There are literally hundreds of them, so we won't be running out of names for quite a while. :-)
-----
I tried an internal modem, but it hurt when I walked.
You can use certain records in your zone file to store descriptive info (geographical, etc,) on your hosts. I don't remember the type of record nor the syntax, but I remember reading about it in O'Reilly's DNS and BIND. This data is obviously easily retrieved via dig, etc.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
The names of Various Tribes (African, Native America, South American, etc, etc), Greek/Roman/Norse Gods, Gods of the many and Various Eastern Religions, and For servers exclusive to the Sales/Marketing/Public Relations departments (if they are bad for you too) possibly the different levels of hell or the names of the many different Deamons/Demons that lurk there for in.
(Score:0, Interesting)
On smaller networks I've used names such as 'SUN' 'MOON' 'MARS' 'SATURN' 'IO' etc. Larger networks, I've found it easier to just name them what they are, i.e. PDC1, PDC2 (Primary Domain Controller) PRNTSRV1, PRNTSRV2 (Print Server) and MAIL1 MAIL2 (E-Mail Server) etc.
There's a local, well-respected ISP here called "Donet". They kinda have a slogan like "Do the net". Anyways, they've got some great names for their machines. These are real; do a reverse DNS lookup on 'donet.com'. Here's a few:
k .donet.comr nt.donet.come t.comm n et.com e t.comd .donet.com
loaf.donet.com
lard.donet.com
baked.donet.com
coolatta.donet.com
twinkie.donet.com
breadstic
muffin.donet.com
crust.donet.com
bu
holeless.donet.com
ort.donet.com ??
nib.donet.com ??
stick.donet.com
oven.donet.com
cinnamon.don
coffeeroll.donet.com
gingerbread.donet.co
stretch.donet.com
cayenne.donet.com
wazzup.do
creampuff.donet.com
creampuff2.donet.com
toasted.donet.com
potpie.donet.com
fritter.don
honey.donet.com
baklava.donet.com
layere
jumbo.donet.com
lowfat.donet.com
You could also run some gratuitous traceroutes (with Name Resolution enabled)and take a look at how some of the larger backbones are naming their routers.... I find this rather interesting sometimes when I'm tracking down latency issues... either that or I'm WAAAY to much into my work
Gravity!... It's not just a good idea... It's the Law!
That's always my favorite theme for naming machines on networks. There's enough fodder there for a freakin' datacenter.
Right now I'm typing this on Nuku Nuku. My 24/7 Linux box is Kenshin. My audiogeeking machine is Dilputer, thanks to my friend Greg who was a layout artist on the Dilbert animated series. Greg did two murals on the Inwin full-tower case, one on one side with "Dilbert at home" and the other side with "Dilbert at work." My collection of currently usable machines rounds out with my graphics production machine Dexter, (complete with Genndy Tartakovsky signature and drawing of Dexter) my Mac G3 Trent, and my two 68K Macs SodyPop (bought from Spumco!) and JaneLane.
I have plenty of options for the future. I suspect if I was building a big network I'd name the main servers after classic Warner Bros., MGM and Fleischer characters and maybe name other less significant servers after Hanna-Barbera characters. Then the workstations would all get Anime names...there are so many to choose from there.
Why do I like this naming scheme so much? Because it would make me smile, even during bad days, to say "well folks, I'm off to fix Daffy, wish me luck."
And I also love cartoons. I never outgrew that.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
UNIX boxes are named UNIXS###, UNIXI###, UNIXH### and UNIXD### for Sun, IBM, HP and DEC. For ### we just use the next available number for that pool.
Someone else stressed it, I'm reinforcing it. Cutesey names are not the way to go. We've got several hundred machines in our DC. I have to work on, maybe, a dozen. All are named after African nations. I have a hard time keeping track of which machine I need to work on for the particular farm I want to access at the moment. Was it Zimbabwe? Nigeria? Sierraleone? Heck if I know. What's worse is when the service is moved so when I finally do remember it I've got to do it all over again.
Give the service name. What the machine does. Don't listen to the peeps saying that it makes it tough to move the machine. That's only a once-in-a-while operation. People or othre machines accessing that information happens all the time. Make the names sensible for the tasks that will cause the most operations. Moving a machine here and there ain't it.
-- Grey d'Miyu, not just another pretty color.
Best set I've heard of lately was a guy testing Intrusion Detection Systems - Blossom, Buttercup, and Bubbles... Did the whole thing just to have an attack server named Mojo Dojo....
When naming machines gets 600+ posts!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I use greek gods (and mythical figures) as my server names. Makes for very cool names, and there's a hell of a lot of them. Charon is my CoyoteLinux router, Selune is my web server, Kronos my main workstation (I've had him the longest), and so on.
I've got a few more planned for the future:
Hermes -- POP
Hephaistos -- development & testing
Pan -- dedicated media box
and, of course,
Aphrodite -- pr0n
:eof
My uni boxen were all named after sunken ships.
"Ooops. Valdez just went down."
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
But not Greek gods. That's just passe.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
One word: Pokemon.
The last few servers the guys and I got to name at my late company got a few fun (but dirty) names:
:) Certainly a bit more interesting to them to sit and watch a teabag for a few minutes than an HPNYWB23!
Dirtysanchez
Donkeypunch
Teabag
Was lots of fun talking to each other about them... was a bit more interesting when we needed to use our "hand and eyes" service at our colo one day when Dirtysanchez didn't make it back from a reboot. The tech on duty had a good laugh at the name, and made a comment about liking our naming conventions
This is my Sig.
Do the kind people moderating the above as Informative cared to read RFC 2100? Have the said moderating beings cared to noticed it was issued on April 1st, 1997? Has the date ringed a bell? No? Guessed so.
As for RFC 2100, it is funny. Very old, but funny anyway.
We have something like 1500+ client computers, so naming THEM correctly is really our priority. We have like 30 servers in all. Heres how we keep them straight:
Client computers get a three letter account prefix, then a three letter cube number. the highest we've gone with the cube numbers is about 375, so we're OK there.
ex: Compaq Consumer, cube 235=CCN235
Comcast, cube 37=CCT037
E*Trade, cube 23=ETR023
Servers are named pretty much after what they do. SQL server is named SQLSVR01, PDC is PDCSVR01, Network attached storage is NASSVR01, Web server named WEB01 (inconsistencies abound..) etc.
Lousy facepalm.
My machines are just Huey Louie and Dewey But I named my pregnancies primus, secundus, tertius,quartius and fortunately stopped at four.yep more babies than machines and born in four different countries too. In those days we didnt know the gender until the nine months were up. Counting in latin or greek you can go on forever.
Between all your staff.. do you have over 4000 ex girlfriends? You could name the machines after their name (or nickname) and why you broke up! (sounds like a Seinfeld naming convention)
For example...:
sarahnotits
samhairy
amybadbreath
and so on...
:-)
As a former systems integrator, I can think of several common mistakes that demonstrate what NOT to do
Basically, mythology, chemistry, literature=good. U.S. presidents("...and then the traffic hit, and Ford just fell over, nyuk nyuk!"), pop culture(except South Park), and Bee Gees singles=bad.
My company uses a pretty simple, yet effective, naming convention for our current servers. It works like this:
;)
;)
;) On the other hand, even a third-grader can grasp that if the second digit in a server's name is X, the server belongs to Client B... ;)
;-)
x1234
where x is a letter and 1, 2, 3, and 4 are digits.
x represents the server's primary function (i.e. w = web server, m = mail server, d = database server). The first digit represents the geographic location of the server. The second digit represents the operating system. The third and fourth digits are just a unique number. For instance, w1312 at our company is a web server in California running Linux.
The advantage of this scheme is that it fits easily into your eight-character limit (even if you have to add a digit or two to expand a category - you'll probably want at least a three-digit unique number if you have thousands of servers) and it allows you to tell at a glance what a server is running, what it does, and where it's located. The disadvantage, of course, is having to learn what the numbers mean...but that's not too hard; a list of the numbers and a Xerox machine (or a mailing list) should take care of that hurdle...
However you divide your machines (client, location, etc.), numbers are probably easier to keep track of in the long run than more descriptive abbreviations. Just make sure to have some sort of central database keeping track of who or what belongs to each number...
Using descriptive names in certain categories is more "fun," but it's no easier to say "Gundam names belong to Joe's Deli" than it is to say "All wx6xx servers belong to Joe's Deli". It's also very confusing if a tech or manager isn't extensively familiar with whatever "categories" you are using. Knowing that Category A belongs to Client B doesn't do much good if your employees don't know what terms fit in that category. And, of course, if you have hundreds of clients, that just adds to the confusion...
Whatever naming scheme you choose, just remember to *document* it...and make backups of the documentation...
DennyK
You're stupid. Do it like this:
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
While you're at it, Intel syntax sucks. Here it is in AT&T:
movb $0x4c, %ah
int $0x21
By the way, here's the equivalent for *BSD/i386:
_start:
pushl $0
movl $1, %eax
int $0x80
And for Linux/i386:
_start:
movl $0, %ebx
movl $1, %eax
int $0x80
I run three servers, and 9 clients in my house icluding laptops. I have insisted...nay, demanded that they all be named after females. Simple and effective, everyone here knows what does what. It always makes good maintenace or LAN party talk "Hey did Amanda go down on you yet or is she still trying to figure out what to do?" and "Shit, I can't get my ping inside Cindy. Shes locked up tight."
This way we always know what bitch fucked us over.
Lousy facepalm.
It works for the Borg, and they have millions of nodes!
Isn't it obvious? Call them all Bruce. *dodges hurled tomatoes*
... my machines tend to be named after spiders - latin names - Atrax, Lycosa, Argiope etc...
My work machines are names after characters in Robert Rankin novels
not exactly scalable either, I guess. I think If I had more than about, say, 20 machines, I'd be looking into grouping the machines into some sort of hierarchy - such as you'd find in nature - all NT boxes named after mammals, all Macs after snakes, all *nixes after fish, DB machines after trees and webservers after rocks or whatever. Group them how you'd like, but make them hierarchical.
It's probably easier to distinguish 10 hierarchies of 20 machines than just a straight list of 200.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
for example: my newest box (if you can really call it NEW :D) i have called OldYella. its a run down P.O.S., but i have to love it, its been with me forever.
Dont ask me...Im just the bass player.
Since most machines can only have one hostname, I'd recommend using the low 8 characters of the MAC address of the primary NIC in hex, or the serial number that your accounting department gave the machine for asset tracking. Not all webservers are always webservers, not all BSD machines are always BSD, not all machines in Chibougamou are always in Chibougamou. So stop trying to think of them in that way.
t h-rack.detroit.datacentre.foo.comr e.external-sites.foo.com
3 rd-rack.chicago.datacentre.foo.come .internal-sites.foo.com
Instead, realize that all well-run single-IT-Department farms that big use DHCP or something similar, which can be based on MAC address.
Then, figure out how you're often going to be thinking of the machines. By location, by OS, by task, etc. So, ff558843.hardware.foo.com would be the box's bona-fide name.
Then, using your l337 DHCP and DNS skillz, make sure that your DNS provides you with all the other conventions that you want. For example:
ff558843.hardware.foo.com would have CNAMEs called:
box0005.7-2.redhat.oses.foo.com
3rd-from-top.4
web0002.insecu
Also, ff558843.hardware.foo.com might have the following CNAMES:
box0002.4-5.openbsd.oses.foo.com
4th-from-top.
ssl0005.secur
Once you have it set up and your DHCP/DNS scripted right, you'll wonder how you ever survived without it.
One needs to "live" with the host/computer names chosen for a long
:
... is also common. ... should be used where
time -- so think, think once more and then only give the computer its
name. Naming a personal computer (PC) or a personal workstation is like
naming a new-born baby or a pet. Don't do it in a hurry.
For a site with many computers, a bad name choice (by you or your
earlier sys admin) will haunt you every day.
Do the following
(1) Read the RFC 1178 (dated August, 1990).
(2) Avoid using names of persons (or potential person names), if
possible. Also, avoid names that can offend someone within your
organization or people around you.
(3) Computer names should preferably have 4-6 alphabets (not more than
8 characters unless you cannot do without having such a long
name).
(4) AVOID using names with underscore character '_'.
(5) Acronyms of projects or departments or name of city of work and then
adding numerals is a common practice for naming computers.
(6) Using pc1, pc2, pc3, pc4, sun1, sun2, hp1, hp2, dec1, dec2, lab1,
lab2, apple1,
(7) "Standard" names like mail, mailhost, mailer, ns, www, web,
server, relay, router, ftp, proxy,
applicable.
(8) Preferably use a theme and pick names according to that.
While I personally like having location in the hostname, our machines move around too much for this to be practical, but rarely move between sites. I can always identify a machine based on the location, then I can check the appropriate inventory based on the asset number for the machine location.
Also, make use of CNAME and virtual ip's! Locking services to a specific hostname and ip makes it really hard to move things around (upgrades, hw failures, service changes). If server a is replaced by b, each client, link, etc must be updated. But, using www and mapping it to a (or b) eliminates this problem. I also go a step farther and map the CNAME to a virtual IP running on that machine. This allows a switch to take effect instantly (by changing the machine using the virtual IP), rather than waiting for DNS to propagate.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
I kinda liked the idea of naming after local sports heroes (payton, butkus, jordan), etc, but we settled on other sports related terms: pigskin, divot, etc.
This sounds very familiar. You don't happen to work in msn operations do you? ;)
The FAA did all the work for you. Go to the local GA airport and get a VFR sectional chart. The VOR intersections all have 5-letter names that are quite pronouncable (over the radio) but most are meaningless. There are dozens on every chart. Also, the VORs themselves have longer names, but there are fewer.
We once had a James Bond naming theme,
with the servers being villains,
workstations - Bond girls, etc.
All done just for the pleasure
of naming the printer Q.
Considered harmful.
I use the names of my forgotten realms characters, and when I run out, I use the WOTC ones, like Drzzt and Simbul. My favorite linux server, the dual Athlon running Gentoo is named Elminister.
Ryan Singer
Personally, I let my servers name themselves. When I built my NAT/router (sssh! don't tell the cable co.), the cheapest hardware I could find was a Duron 750. Having successfully run NAT/routers on a 486, a Duron seemed overkill. Thus was born marvin. The MOTD is a paraphrase from H2G2. Other boxen are quicksand (every time I tried to fix that damned thing, it sucked me in deeper), tower (domain controller at an airport), gozer (that fucker is evil, I swear...killed two HDD's, one proc, at least one DIMM...), the yet to be built media servers rosen and valenti, etc. Have fun with it--you're the admin, it's one of the few chances you get to make your mark. You can always use the DNS to assign logical names--assigning aliases by service tends to work well.
Other good names include the DNS servers at my university. zoo is the first DNS server; it is so named because the admin who built it looked at the DNS tables and remarked that they looked like a zoo. ooz is the second one (zoo backwards, for the dim), then ozo, and finally zoz. All of my workstations are named by room number, and yes, they do get renamed when they move. I do this because I don't have access to the DNS tables, so I can't put useful information in the table. If I could, I'd let the users name them (without telling them, of course...).
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
Where I used to work, all Win2k desktops were named SPECIES+3 digit number. They had all been assimilated, thus the name. Servers had a Borg them e as well such as Unimatrixzero, Onevoice, Onemind, Collective, etc. We named the Linux boxes whatever the hell we felt like.
You mean you don't have to pick the names for your servers from the Lord of the Rings...??
RMN
~~~
At http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0501/Naming.pdf you will find a Sun BluePrint entitled "Datacenter Naming Scheme" that offers methodologies to do exactly what you are looking for.
OK,
we have 3 admin type folks and
a growing network.
We have a simple, system.
I name stuff I build and take care of after
Clov DVA songs, so we have hide, and consent and
silent and buried_dreams and so on
Another guy uses names from Norse and european Mythology, so he has Loki and so forth.
THe last guy, gets his names from harry potter.
The advantage of the system is that we know
who's server it is by looking at the name.
Of course we have a boat load of customer hardware now. THe customer stuff is named in a much lamer way. Thier firewalls are customername0.domainname.com
With everything else folloing 1 after another from that.
Finally, my workstation, and all of my home harware is named after demons from the Goetia.
There are a boatload of names to useup and they sound impressive.
I guess CmdrTaco will be the mom, and CowboyNeal the dad. Tim will be the son, and JonKatz the illegitamate daughter.
Sure there are more then enough users to go on, but not all registered users post. So good luck in finding at least 4,000 names.
Well.. if all else fails, and you're short of that magical 4,000 names, just fill it in with a bunch of AC's.
I just name my servers after them thar ewnicks commands:
t
ping
whois
tracert
fdisk
format
prompt
se
fsck
dd
sendmail
mailx
smbclient
I go with completely unrelated themes. My personal favorite is phlya, genera, and species of interesting marine fauna. So, I used to have a subdomain filled with latin names of various sea slugs. Only downside of my particular choice was some people had trouble spelling gymnothorax or navanax. You might want something less obscure.
Use a different theme for each category of server if that helps you. If the category definitions change, you can still keep the names.
If you need to have structure around them, they can also be x127224.cust1.example.net or x127224.sfo.example.net, but you'll have a relational database of some sort keeping track of machine name, IP address, hardware model, serial number, amount of RAM, disk, etc., location in the room, and what users are on it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Name them after types of cheese. It worked for Monty Python. They were in that cheese shop for hours :)
The plusses? Thouroughbred breeders go to a lot of trouble to pick unique names, why waste their effort? You can even have some measure of "sub-theming" if you track heredity, since offspring of successful horses often have something similar about their names (e.g., the naval theme of Man 'o War's offspring; he was the sire of Gunboat, Flagship, and Flotilla (all not so famous), and the very famous War Admiral). You can also get some really cool login pictures / wallpapers of the winning horses if you nose around on the web long enough.
The minuses? Well, I guess typing in 'telnet long-ass-horse-name' could get old, and also the fact that there is a lot of punctuation in some of those names. I also guess that on occasion, it would get frustrating to see all those fast ponies running so damn slow.
I guess it's nostalgia, since I grew up in Kentucky and went to college in Louisville. I guess if I ever ran out of horse names, I could always start naming machines after bourbon brands.
On a network I administrated, a colleague came up with a wine name scheme. It was a Romance Lingusitics section, so we used French wines for French specialists, Italian wines for Italianists, Spanish wines for Hispanists, and so on. It takes a really long time to run out of wine names---and it is very easy to expand into beers, or liqueurs, or whatever...
Yquem, Pinot Grigio, Rioja, Verde (Vinho verde)...
Names of cities in particular countries or states also work well---anything that seems limitless and already possesses some sort of hierarchy you can twist to your own ends.
We use ISO country code and the service type for our names as we are a large global corporation with thousnds of server around the globe, using a logical namning convention makes things easier.
An SAP R/3 in us would be ussap01
An Oracle server would be usora01
An EDI server would be usedi01
An Radius server would be usrad01
An vnp machine would be usvnp01
An Firewall would be usfw01
An IDS machine would be usids01 (ofcouse ids and fw's does'nt have dns names for security reasons)
This problem reminded my of my problem with naming my pictures collection (yes, of that kind)...o n][series -number].[fileextension]
I used the following scheme:
[race-country][single-group][type-positi
Sometimes I'd want to browse a particular type of pics so I'd create a script to output those to a temp folder or create a HTML album-file..
This server naming problem is the same thing..Sometimes you'll want to backup servers on 2nd floor, sometimes to shutdown all Web servers, etc.
I guess you'd want to think of things you plan do do with those servers (backups, upgrades, automatic installation/deployment, etc.) and then create a sufficient number of attributes so that you can always manipulate/extract servers you need. At least that's what I'm going to do with my porn collection.
It would surely be possible to pick items that have a natural 'progression', yet be humanly understandable. The "progression" can be used to ease identification-- the conceptually largest machine might be the box with the latest equipment, or the newest one, or...
For example:
"washington, jefferson, lincoln, hamilton, jackson, grant, franklin, mckinley, cleveland, madison, chase, wilson" -- the figures on US currency in order of denomination
Or you could take just the last n figures of the serial number of the machine-- perhaps with something descriptive of it too...
"hp712-4084, hp712-4090, hp712-4540, amdk6-1006, amdk6-1500, ip5-3338"
Actually, you're stupid - your method doesn't give a defined exit code as his did.
Os is abreviated like hp=HPUX n=NT and such so we get hpsapdb01.bigcapnetworkco.com. Easy to see what it does and which SA owns it but huge PITA rember the name. At one time we had over 400 servers named like this.
The older machines had cooler names including one bunch named after LOTR characters. Gandalf and Sauron were E10k DB servers and there were a bunch of fileservers named Pippin,Frodo,Samwise,etc. All that's left of those is Brandybuck, Arwen and Misty(as in Mountains).
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
At work we use penguin species. rockhopper, chinstrap, and gentoo, the linux laptop is magellan.
At home I use characters from the Harry Potter books. My firewall is dementor, the web server is Hagrid. Dumbledore is off line at the moment.
My wife is like Unix. Lots of commands. Lots of arguments.
I visited a semi-large company a few days ago, and they named all of their servers after animals. Seeing that we have a zillion of species, I think they may be a nice idea :)
More in the vein of how-it's-done-here/there -- general format is machine.building.etc.etc.etc.
Phobias (Mac cluster; "agoraphobia.mmp.andrew.cmu.edu", "bogyphobia", etc., tagged on each machine with definition.)
Prisons (More Macs; "stateville.bh.andrew.cmu.edu")
Sherlock Holmes and related characters (DECStations; "moriarty.bh.andrew.cmu.edu")
Astronauts (More DECStations; "glenn.res.andrew.cmu.edu")
Disasters (Still more DECs; "earthquake", "flood", "mankind.weh.andrew.cmu.edu")
Climates (Highly desirable, at the time, SPARCStations; "tundra.weh.andrew.cmu.edu")
Most of the printers were named for species of trees, with certain paired exceptions [[Calvin, Hobbes], [Chip, Dale]], as well as "Smoke". Alas I cannot recall the naming for Hunt basement or the HP/UXen in weh. Infra? Inferno? Hmmm. I would assume the graphics stations in dh were named interestingly but never had occasion to use them. I don't recall anything at all about the large Mac cluster in weh, except that all the RAM was stolen by a dim bulb who left behind a screwdriver with his name on it. Way back in 1995, when 16-to-24 MB of RAM was worth stealing.
--sk5t
Say you host servers for the FooBar corporation; you would then name the servers as "fbn01e1", "fbn10e3" etc.
Looks cryptic? It's not:
fb - FooBar
n01 - Node #01
e1 - Ethernet interface #1
Many may not realize, but it's not about naming computers, it's about naming the interfaces that matters. You don't touch the computer, you log in through the interface. You don't connect the computer to a router, you plug in the cat5 to the interface.
The node numbers above btw are not sequential, they're rack/slot numbers. So the first slot on the first rack would be n01; if that computer was a 4U rackmount, the next one would be called n05. Given 40U racks, the first server on the second rack would be called fbn41e1.
What's really good about this naming convetion is that it's really easy to locate individual servers; let's say mathilda.foobar.com won't ping anymore - how the hell do you know where it is if there are 200 foobar.com -computers! And they all have at least two network interfaces... If it was fbn45e2 that's dead you'd know instantly that it's the FooBar corparation's server on the fourth slot of rack #2 AND the second ethernet interface that's won't answer anymore.
At work we had a small sub-domain of 10 servers, all WinNT Enterprise machines, and we've got them grouped like this:
:) Sometimes its Ops-A-S, or Opsas, or Ooopsies, or en-GAS, or Angus :)
OPSAS1 - Operations Advanced Server 1
OPSAS2 - Operations Advanced Server 2
ENGAS1 - Engineering Advanced Server 1
ENGAS2 - Engineering Advanced Server 2
Simple, but it allows for very accurate recordkeeping, plus its very funny to see how people pronounce those names
Mouse, Mice. Goose, Geese. Moose... Moose?
but we named ours after the thugs in Reservoir Dogs -- mrwhite,mrpink,mrorange,mrblonde.
Make me aerodynamic in the evening air
Used drinks at one .com. Started with lemondrop and cosmopolitan. It was fun when we got enough servers that we created sub-themes: java servers were orange juice-based. When we had to get some Windows servers we named them all after ghetto malt liquers. In our office, I started out naming printers after local bars.
:}
... it really got out of hand, though, when I decided to name a new pair of servers "seven" and "andseven". There was rebellion at that point.
a place i used to work at named computers after comedians. developres in my division needed two computers each, so we used comedian pairs; my computers were Mork and Mindy, a coworker's were Rocky and Bulwinkle.
...but that won't work for 4000 computers. i'd instead suggest, since you will doubtless be ordering many computers of the same model, use a common name for each; so the Dell Enterprise 3500s would all be dent35 and Sun SunBlade 100s would all be sunb100. insert as a prefix some more unique thing, say order of installation or something there are lots of, like colors or comedians, or a different scheme per order.
... i've seen a computer lab use Pink Floyd albums as names, and color photocopies of their covers are glued on their cases. so be creative and have fun with your scheme.
examples: orchid-dent35, cyan-dent35, cosby-sunb100, carlin-sunb100.
this way the name both describes the computer (and in a way that doesn't change when it's use does) and gives it personality.
nice thing about colors is that you can actually paint!
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I have mrlunt and larryboy so far, check it out:
t m
http://www.bigideafun.com/veggietales/default.h
schu
i found a good way is to name servers aft gods and deitys cos there are soo meny of them dont know about 4000 of them but it is posoble and it will add a bit of class
I usually use a naming scheme like [xx][dddd][xx], where xx is a two-letter combination, and dddd is a number.
;-)))
You could also steal some ideas from The Name Book
Jacek Artymiak
freelance consultant and writer
master of many a page
Our naming convention is simple:
The canonical name of a machine is assigned by the person who is setting up the machine at the time a name is needed. That name stays with that machine throughout its "lifetime." More on a machine's lifetime later. The only three constraints on the name are as follows:
1. It must be something that most people can spell if they heard the name.
2. It must be a name which can be published in a newspaper without embarassing us.
3. The name may not be duplicated.
Notice that this is the canonical name for a machine. We never call one of our machines smtp or www. We alias those standard names to the canonical name.
We define a lifetime for a machine as the time from which it is named to when it has lost its essence. In turn, we define a machine's essence as that which fundamentally separates it from other machines. In our current business, a machine's essence almost always is defined as the machine's purpose in life, which typically includes its OS and the servers running on the machine. There are times where we have converted a machine from Linux to OpenBSD, for example, but kept the name. If the machine is retasked, then it usually gets a fresh OS and new name; the old machine "dies" and a new machine is "born."
That name is added to a database via a record which also contains the machine's hardware configuration, its MAC address, the OS, its maintainer's email address, and its intended purposes in life (smtp, http, file server, compute server, etc.). From that point on, it is the responsibility of the maintainer to update that record. The hostname is considered the database key, and is therefore not supposed to change.
Every six months, however, clean out the database, looking for cruft and abandoned machines. We also try to identify machines that didn't make it into the database and add them. This also provides a quick way to inventory our equipment, since we primarly own computers and network gear.
check them out in order here
0 0
0 0
0 0
:uranus", as in,
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?toon=10-14-
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?toon=10-15-
http://www.inktank.com/AT/index.cfm?toon=10-16-
planets:
"I'm having trouble downloading logs from uranus"
computer companies: "wang"
17th century french authors: "dumas", "balzac" - heh
- Linux boxes be named after species of penguins
- Solaris boxes named after celestial bodies
- Macs named after varieties of apples
- and, of course, Windows boxes would have to be named after famous crashes (pamam103, twa800, titanic, hindenberg, etc.)
The sad part is that people took me seriously. One guy even claimed Magellanic for his Linux box.- Richie
How about using file extensions? There are 25*25*25 = 15625 TLA's available, so there is no chance of running out of space. Drawback: could be
;D
confusing....
Anyway, I'm using smurfs, but then I only have about 2 boxes at the moment
/Smuffe
Of the hundreds of people who replied to this, a few of them seem to work, as I do, in a large installation with thousands of hosts. It is no coincidence that those few advocate a hierarchical naming scheme. Nothing else can scale to the number of *admins and other people* involved. That's what you need to scale. Sure, you could name hosts after (as one person suggested) 4,000 famous people, but not even the people who assign the names will remember what host does what a week later.
Go with something purely functional, such as mx01.mail.domain.com for the first MX (for example) or ns01.dns.domain.com, etc. Or if you have multiple locations, you can incorporate a geographical reference: mx01.mail.snd.domain.com for the first MX physically located in San Diego.
You can obscure it to something more encoded if you want, but both the safety you get from doing so and the risk you get from making your naming conventions plain are vastly exaggerated. Attackers most typically go after whole netblocks and they scan by IP address, not FQDN.
On the other hand, if someone has it in for your organization specfically, they may try to expressly target important hosts in your network. A person doing this is going to be far more skilled than a script kiddie scanning netblocks.
In this case, having clear host names may help the attacker a little bit, but not much, and having obscured ones may slow the attacker down a little bit, but not much. This attacker *will* find out what your important hosts are, easily, with or without the help of your naming convention.
Bottom line: choose names that are easy for your staff to deal with, then lock down the boxes so they are hard for attackers to deal with.
Our plainly labeled boxes get probed all the time, but not more than our idiosyncratically labeled admins' workstations do. The naming convention hasn't seemed to have made any difference, so go for clarity.
If you need huge amounts of unique names, you'll have to go with a system like Pokemon (or a similar one, if your hatred of them overcomes your need for server names ;-). Tolkien names, Pratchett names, something like that - they all provide lots of unique names. But, indeed, they all run out. So maybe name all the, e.g. Sun servers, after Roman gods, and all the Mail servers after games like Tron, Pong, Zork, Pacman and Sopwith... ;-)
No trumpets, no drums.
Serious!
:)
My girlfriend is always wondering what i'm doing at work, i sometimes tries to explain it to her (i'm a unix sysadm), but she gets that weird look when i say compile, debug and alike
To give her the impression, that it's understandable to her, whenever i install a new server, i call her up and ask her to name it...
And theres the added bonus, that whenever you ssh into one of your servers, you will be reminded og her long-ago dead puppy... heh
How about updating to then modern age Cerberus, a.k.a. Fluffy from Harry Potter? :)
Nice innocent-sounding name too
Warwick uni used to have a sort of policy of splitting machine names by department. Computer Science had mineral, Computing Services had vegetable and Maths had the animals.
So CS had "quartz", "flint", "granite" and a main server named "stone". CServices had things like "poppy" and "lily", and Maths had "rabbit" and "fox" and things.
Scheme kind of fell apart and we ended up with all sorts of bizarre things: a lab referred to occaisionally as the morgue, where machines were called "foot", "finger", "liver". A room called the meat locker where they were called "spam", "ham", "mutton", "beef"...
Body parts is a good one, there's a lot of them, especially once you start including internal organs, although it's a bit gross and people fight to get "spleen" as their workstation. Herbs as well; although spelling them is quite hard sometimes.
Finding 4000 consistent names is going to be hard though. You might be better just having "www00189" type ones, boring though it is.
00000001
00000002
.
.
.
10000000
and you've got lots of room for expansion.
Later,
Bill
The machines all have a number, the IP!!!!!
The naming scheme is for humans...
Tell me, when was the last time you bought 3530031189 instead of a tissuebox?
SI units are a good way of generating medium numbers of names, particularly with clusters of machines.
For each cluster, choose a unit (e.g. metre), and then, hey presto, you have micrometre, millimetre, centimetre, decimetre, etc.
The enthusiastic can use the weird binary SI prefixes too, but people might look askance at mention of a mebimetre.
All our dev machines are named after porn stars. It all began because we had a machince called "lovelace" (after Ada) and I couldn't resist adding "lords", "jameson", etc. etc. Needless to say we named the live servers differently although its still good to send people to lovelace when we're developing for them.
"Don't open the gates, who the hell needs a wooden horse that size?"
At my last job we use a Seinfeld theme. Of course, :)
the usual suspects jerry, kramer, elaine (no george though...) were represented. Some of not-so-common
characters we had we pennypacker, mandelbaum, puddy.
newman was the mail server of course
The scottish univeristy I used to work in used forths (for *nix - Forth, Clyde etc.) and rivers (for windows - Tay, Earn etc.). Look at any country with a northern coastline and there's hundreds to choose from.
My own network mainly uses Munros (scottish mountains), but my laptops - of which there's always going to be only a few - use pagan sabbats and other festivals.
Personally I disagree with the people who say you should use a purerly functional scheme. IMHO I've always found 'meaningful' names to good memory aides.
Yes, 15 chars. NetBIOS names are 16 chars long but the last char is actually a byte representing service type.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
A:Boot up?
B:Which server?
A:Up.
B:Up who?
A:The server.
B:Which?
A:Boot up.
B:Boot up what server?
A:No no what server should stay up!
B:I don't know.
A:No no that's our web server.
B:Your web server is "I don't know"?
A:Yes. But nevermind, we need to boot up.
B:What server?
A:What server should stay up.
B:I'm ASKING YOU THAT! WHAT SERVER SHOULD STAY UP?
A:Certainly.
B:Oh at last! So certainly should stay up. Ok, so I should boot what server?
A:No no no, what server should stay up!
B:Certainly.
A:OK, so now boot up!
B:AAAAARGH! What does that server do?
A:It's a mail server.
B:So, what you get mail what server does it say in the headers it's from?
A:No no, what server's our web server. It says it's from up.
B:What do you mean up? Mail can't come from up!
A:It can if it's our mail server.
B:You're mail server is called "it" and it should boot it up?
A:No no no! It's our DNS server! We should be booting up!
B:So we should be booting it up?
A:No. We should be booting up.
B:THAT'S WHAT I SAID!
...
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
here is what we do here...
We take the first letter of each of the first 2 syllables in the company name. For Joe's Diner, this is JD
We put in two letters to indicate what the server is for. IN for Internet/Intranet, FP for File/Print, etc.
We put in 2 letters to indicate whether the box is local or remote. WA for Wide Area. LO for local
We put in a letter for the location of the machine. Eg. N for New York (in our case D for Dublin, M for Maidstone).
Then we fill the rest of the space with numbers.
This could give us something like
JDINWAN1
or
JDFPLOC5 (C for Chicago!)
or
JDINLOD7
It works fairly well for us, and by picking letters for the various positions in the name, you can make most of the names pronouncable. J'Dinlod 7, J'Dinwan 1.
Maybe using FI instead of FP, you can have
JDFILOC5 (J'D'Filoc 5)
T.
[random combination of numbers and letters]
This is the most useful naming convention you can use:
1 - you are the only one who (after 100 randomly named servers) probably owns the complete list of names.
2 - no one can figure out whether asd356m is a web or ftp server and is on the second or first floor, room ???.
After few randomly named server you will became the only source of knowledge for your company; so your value will became veeeeery high. You can then ask a payrise every 3 months ("otherwise you can give to the other guys the management over sj3457ssf and qrio2d3" !).
Make things unanderstandable and YOU will became the most valuable resource of your company.
(Programmers' adaption of the previous rule: Use a very bad programming style! If it takes a month to add 5 lines of code... you will grant yourself work forever!; check this)
667 The Neighbour of the Beast
Famous people. That'll be nice. "Jim Jones just died and took down all of his clients with him."
Locations: NEVER name them after locations. I was at a place that named all computers by building and room number. This fell apart quickly on the next big office juggling.
Aside from that, we have named servers after rivers in the world.
Any naming scheme will be dificult to implement when you're looking at +200 machines. Results are likely as incomprehensible, inpronounceable as ip-adresses are by themselves. Implementing some naming-scheme for this number of servers completely surpasses the goal of naming. Why not just stick with the ip adress naming scheme?
Well, there's a lot of comments, and I'm past the 700 mark, so I suspect this may be redundant, or just never going to get read. Oh well, I've Karma to spare ;p :)
But: Servers should have multiple names.
A primary name - this should follow whatever convention you feel happy with. Lord of the Rings if you feel the need, although my personal favourite (at the moment at least) is AD&D monsters. That way I get to put pictures of them on the side
The key point is that this name must be distinctive, so if someone shouts is across the room, there are no misunderstandings.
Finding 4000 isn't going to be easy, but if there's some clear cut division on machines for naming convention purposes, then use multiple conventions. A 'service' name. Probably doesn't matter hugely in a 4000 server farm (I'm guessing they're going to be web servers), but in general terms, if it's a DNS server, have a 'DNS' or 'DNS0' alias for it. ALWAYS access the DNS using 'DNS0' rather than the primary hostname. That way service migrations are simple. Add multiple aliases for other services.
A name by location. Eg SR1R10U4 for server room 1 rack 10, unit 4. Makes finding the particular box which needs a cable plugging in to it really easy.
I find it rather disturbing, that you would know the actual part number of an tissuebox...
My domain uses Al Qaeda related names. It's great. We have osama, omar, taliban, atef, lindh. If you run out of names, just do more research on religious extremists.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
cat /usr/share/dict/words | cut -b1-8 | uniqb andon
and get 36084 cool names for your computers.
Aarhus
Aaron
Ababa
aback
abaft
a
abandone
abandoni
...
Top Cool Server Hostnames
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Clearly, the naming convention you select is very important for large diverse networks. The convention I have used for several years is very similar to the one mentioned above, but you definatly want to use all available character posistions.
... Well anyway... TS for terminal server etc. etc etc..
I use: AAABBCCC
AAA - is a 3 character City Code NYC or PAR for Paris, etc..
BB is a two character Function code (UX for unix, RT for Router, NT for
CCC is a 3 digit sequence number. I usually make the sequence number unique to the City code, but that limits you to 999 servers per location.
I would prefer a AAABBXCCC. That one additional X can provide a lot more iformation. Department, Network Segment or simply an additional digit for the sequence number. Unfortunately, some devices won't take a 9 digit hostname.
I have found this convention to be flexible and it makes network management much easier. I have always hated working in environments that don't have a decent naming convention. But that's just me..
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
It is important to quickly locate a broken server and cute names don't help there. You probably have a raised floor with 2' x 2' removable panels. If you think of the floor as a grid system and label the grid at the edges of the room, say along the north wall start with "A" and proceed through the alphabet until you hit the next wall, then on the east wall start numbering at zero or one and proceed to the last tile. Each tile can then be identified uniquely as "B7" (for example). Each cabinet rack then gets named with the name of the floor tile at its front left corner. Each server then gets named with the cabinet name plus a suffix that indicates its position in the rack (eg. C08-003). Such a naming convention isn't cute, but it means when server C08-03 goes down it can be quickly located and serviced. You can always create CNAME records in DNS with cute names for those who are offended by practicaliaty. Also, LOC or TXT records can be created in DNS that stores this info too.
- servnix (for the webserver)
- routnix (the router)
- zaehlnix (for the accounting. german "zaehl"=="to count").
- ...
Easy to remember and when the server is down you can always blame it on the name. ("servnix"=="serves nothing")I use Welsh gods for my home LAN. Arawn, coincidentally, is my router :o)
You win again, gravity!
Best singles:
:)
'bourgeois.xenote.com' (The company was french. It
also effectively prevented my boss (an ex-engineer) to log in and tinker with my config too often - the French can't spell it either
I liked 'morningwood.interval.com' also.
Best flaimebait:
'makethenetfreeforchildpornography.c2.net'
Bext convention for small machine groups:
1. Unpack the case and check out the 'made in'
sticker.
2. Name the machine 'stupid white man' in the languguage of that country, eq 'gringo', 'baca-gajin', etc.
I have to say i've used 3 different naming conventions over the past couple of years.
:
.
;-)
The first was a company I worked for in Scotland, they named all machines after various scottish lochs. Confusing at first, until I realised that each machine had a map/picture of the loch itself nearby!
The second is at my new place. It goes like this
UK W x sssss ff nn
UK - Country is UK
W - for workstation
x - number of workstation (first is 1, second 2, etc.)
sssss - first 5 letters of surname
ff - first two letters of first name
nn - number only if surname/first name pattern has already been used (and this is nationally!)
And, the 3rd pattern is my own . .
General servers are named after Star Trek computer cores (so first server is Primary_Core, then there's Starboard_Secondary_Core, and Port_Secondary_Core)
Other servers are named as their purpose (so my mail server is named Subspace_Comms)
Oh, and as i'm sad enough to have a Win98 box, i've renamed 'My Computer' to 'Computer Core', 'Network Neighborhood' to 'Optical Device Network', I did use to rename Outlook to 'Subspace Communications', but then I got rid of it for Pegasus, and i've got IE renamed as 'Subspace Data Network'.
Just for a bit of fun!
My home boxen are: orac, slave and zen. Of course this doesn't scale at all beyond three boxes...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
In a previous job we had machines named after drugs. Developer conversations could be amusing. "NFS isn't working" "Which environment?" "I'm on heroin but I guess I could switch to methadone" ...
There's nothing magical about a job and a family that makes someone a better or more knowledgable person. It's a myth. Look at all the broken or otherwise dysfunctional families out there. Look at all the employed parents who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag, or in fact contribute at all to the intellectual advancement of the world. There is more to life than breeding and consuming. Thank God.
We operate roughly 250 sites (the company I work for, not my university). Here's how we do it w/out going crazy:
Every site has up to a 5 digit site code based on city. When there are multiple sites in one city, we usually cut the city down to 2 or 3 letters and then the last three are made up of the uniquely indentifying part of the name. For example:
Minneapolis Kilbourn = MNWKB
Minneapolis Processing = MNPRC
St. Louis = LOUIS
And so forth. That is the base name for all sites. Now, we name all servers and workstations off of this.
PDC's
XXXXX_NTP01
BDC's
XXXXX_NTB01
Router
XXXXX_RTR01
NT Member Server
XXXXX_NTA01
2K Member Server
XXXXX_2KA01
DVD Writers
XXXXX_DVD01
And so forth...
Every one of our machines has an asset tag - we use those to determine the name along w/ the site code. We only have NT workstations, but we still identify that in the name. The asset tag is made to always be 6 numbers long.
LOUISNT013456
It's not the friendliest convention, but it works well!
Whisky is a great base for computer naming (even though if you have 4000 machines and a 8-character limit it will not work very well).
I use Great Single malts for my favourite machines (Ardbeg for my G4, Port-Ellen for my Firewall and Auchroisk for my laptop). Machines that I dont like that much, particularly those running windows, can be named using nasty American blends like Jim Bean (Huh!).
Looking at www.maltmadness.com most people will find more Whiskys than they have computers (and they are rated as well).
If you are using American, Irish, Canadian and Scotch Wiskies and still cant come up with more names, just add bottling etc:
ardbeg1975
ardbeg17years
ardbeg_caskstrength
etc.
We name our servers after Sopranos characters. We haven't used 'Pussy' yet (saving that one for something special).
I was at a place that used serial killers as server names.
NG
GACY
SHIPMAN
Here's a simple and very one:
/. users!!!)). Then, when you want to find out where all your "Server Farm for App X" are, simple do a query for "App X" on your palm pilot and all the IDs pop up.
Assign to servers a sequential number, i.e. 100.mydomain.com, 101.mydomain.com, 102.mydomain.com, etc. Then, everytime you create a new server add then to a Palm Pilot database (you might want to write a custom app for this (hint to
Advantages:
- No name collisions
- Practically infinite number of names
- Easy to locate server by any function type
- Easy to number servers on racket (100, 101, 102)
- Easy to find out new names (just increment!)
- Definitelly easy of use
Dissadvantages:
- Must have a PDA (which IT person doesn't?)
- Must have an app for this purpose on the PDA
- Must make sure to sync latest data to PDA
Actually, Chemistry was my thought for expansion. After you run out of elements, new machines are named isotopes or molecules.
Of course, your dynamically reconfigured computation farm should simply be "fire".
Our servers are named after Indy 500 drivers. (We started out using only firsts, to wit HARROUN and GUTHRIE, but ran out of firsts pretty fast.) The Indianapolis Motor Speedway site has a complete list of drivers, and I imagine that other tracks would too.
:-)
We're stuck with shortie names too, alas. I can't use HURTUBISE since we gave up Netware.
(For internal stuff I have lately been using names drawn from Norse mythology. Microsoft-based boxes get the bad-guy names.
We use putrid smells for our server names. We have the obligatory fart and poop and BO. We also have BurningHair, RottenFlesh, our newest server is named GrandmasFarts.
On my small LAN at home, i use various forms of the english language. Lingo, Slang, Malarky, Jive, Jargon, etc etc etc. I'm sure you could change this around and find enough slang terminology in our horrible language to name those 4000 servers of yours.
----- diwelf
isn't boron the new AMD chip they're working on?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Well if physically finding the machines is important, why not use machine names of:
Longitude+Latitude+Altitude
With enough precision the names are guarenteed to be unique (to one universe). You could even install GPS and altimeter cards and have the machines name themselves automatically.
Name em as per function/location
example NIS master in room 421
YPM421
Example Name server 2 in bldg 20 room 11
NS2-20-11.blah.blah.com
Samba server for marketing #5
smb5mktg
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I co-developed a standard for naming servers that works for most UNIX variants and also NT servers. Basically I name them by their location, service and then a number. For example, at my St. Louis office I would have STLFIL01, which is St. Louis File Server 01. In Chicago I might have CHIEML01, which is an email server in Chicago.
It's not a great standard, and for the uninitiated it does look kind of daunting, but once you get the hang of how it's configured it's easy to see at-a-glance what each server does.
If anyone would like a more detailed breakdown of the entire design, please email me. BTW, I've got some semi-random characters in the email address I use here, so remove them before sending. It's pretty self-explanatory though!
Gavin.
With 4000 servers you would need to know the name of the server and the location (which would require an additional server map). Why not combine the two requirements and use GPS coordinates! Hey Bob the N30-24-66_W97-54-19 server just went down, go reboot it!
The electric yellow has got me by the brain banana
In my bathroom my roommate placed the Period Table of Elements. I like using these for my machine names...hydrogen, helium, berylium, etc.
My girlfriends father names his dogs (Afgans) after countries such as China, Uzbekistan (wrong spelling of course), etc. Which is also neat.
Southpark characters work, galaxies.
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
We use a couple conventions depending on the customer...
2- country
2- city
1- server type
4- group designation
3- number>
for example: ustrdgscm001 (US, Troy, Domain controller, group-name, servernumber)
We also deal with it by subdomains... server.SSCCC.cc.company.com where SS is state/province, CC is the city, cc is the country. But that's just us.
At home, I do mythology. linux=roman, win=greek, *bsd=egyptian.
"It compiles, SHIP IT!" -Overheard at Microsoft's development lab
I may not know shit but this isn't the point - I know more than you!
Elgon
All of the suggestions I've read - and I was fed up by half way down the first page - suggest that the people answering this question have:
In an effort to put some kind of useful answer into this space, please have a look at Sun BluePrints Online - Datacenter Naming Scheme - PDF and see what professionals have to say rather than the rantings of a 16 year old who dreams of running out of names from the seven dwarves when he gets his eighth computer.
Feel free to mod me down for ranting, but damnit, people deserve a decent answer to a question that is not easily answered by 2 minutes on google.
As long as you have cowboyneal.* and microsoft.com.die.die.die.*, who cares about the rest?
when i worked for visa interactive, all the servers were named after beer. it was kinda cool going "im going to work on guiness today"
*** I suffer from a colorful array of psychological problems
I used to work for a company called Broadwing, my co-workers named their servers after demons. The other departments would refuse to call the servers by their "real names".
it's a sig, wtf?
We name most of our servers after cartoon dogs. There is not usually an association between the dog's personality and the purpose of the server, they are just names...
For example:
brain (Inspector Gadget)
slink (Toy Story)
astro (Jetsons)
spike (Peanuts)
scooby (Scooby Doo)
perdita (101 Dalmatians)
odie (Garfield)
We have over 20 servers named after dogs. Most are frontend web servers.
At the college I attended, servers were named after virtues/fruits of the spirit/biblical terms:
faith, peace, hope, charity, grace, wisdom, judah
At one of my former employers, servers were named after stones/minerals:
jasper, amethyst, quartz, ruby
Colossusr t
Guardian
HAL9000
P1
WOPR
Daneel
Go
Marvin
Vger
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Eons ago (1990-91 or so), my office got a Sun 4/280 and four Sun SLC diskless workstations. On my suggestion, we named them after the Marx brothers. The SLCs were harpo (mine), groucho, zeppo, and chico.
The 4/280? "karl"
___
Cognitive Overflow
more than yo
-Derek
One word: Pokemon.
We've got a lab at school in which the machines are all named after Pokemon. It's kinda silly to log into Wigglytuff, but you've got hundreds of names to use.
I work in a development enviroment, and every developer has a range of static IPs where they can name thier systems pretty much anything they want.
We have hundreds of names such as alpha, bizarro, crow, deadpool, ed209, foxtrot, godzilla, hannibal, ificanthave, juliet, kadet, leela, mrdata, ns2, oscar, pinky, rocky, sixmilman, torgo, uniblab, wolverine, yahriel, and zero. For the most part very few have CNAMEs because it's just not needed. We know what services are ran on which systems, and don't worry about it. It takes new employees about 3 days to figure out where all the good stuff is.
It's kind of fun to say "Chomper has crashed" or "Go reload robocop with the latest patches".
We use an interesting convention here... :-)
os + location + type number + server number for example if type 1 was email, and we were looking at the second email server, you might see NTOKC102 for the server name. I'd like to use a 2 or 3 digit number for the server number part, to allow for growth. We may not have more than 9 email servers in OKC now, but it would be nice to be able to grow into it... No Y2k bugs for me, thanks.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
My network is named after molluscs starting with the letter S. Good thing I'm a poor destitute musician who can't afford more than 5 computers, because I think that's all there are! Squid (main box), slug (slow firewall box), snail, scallop, and scapholopod. I haven't been able to come up with any more than that...
I worked at a place where all the machines were named after muppets. It was great. Animal was the four-processor Ultra450 (it was a fast machine at the time, and didn't spontaneously reboot)...my Windows box was Camella, who was (anybody know? I didn't) Gonzo's gf.
that's the source! We even have onan.our-domain.tld ;-)
Cuba++ let's make ++ better
I have a *nix / NT LAN. As such, I have a oodle of printers and such, some jet direct, others just shared, etc. For the workstations, I just use their email username--keeps it simple. but for the servers, I ran into a problem using cartoon charachters for host names. I used to use names from the cartoon strip Bloom County. However, this year I began to run out of charachters. What to do? So, I decided to use something that would give me relationships (e.g. a shared printer) between devices. I decided to use protagonists from the plays of William Shakespeare (exempting Romeo and Juliet, of course). Hence, I have a logon server named Prospero, and if I were to have to assign a host name to a device attached to that server, I would use another charachter from The Tempest. To keep track, I decided to use the /etc/hosts file on my workstation. I use aliases for the old names, and comment the heck out of each line.
As in:
Clorophyll? More like BOROphyll!
Sorry, old Adam Sandler.
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
when your server farm is not too large, themes can be pretty cool.
:)
we currently use names from startrek (borg stuff is the best
unimatrix (db)
datanode (storage)
vinculum (mail and stuff)
atavachron (backups)
etc...
I used to work in a small ISP where the workstations used SI units, telco hardware used Sci-Fi authors, the 33.6 pool had x-files characters, big servers had movies producers/directors, small ones had actors names...
mho
what about computer games ? :)
Chech out
RFC1178 / FYI0005: "Choosing a Name for Your Computer" for the IETF recommendations.
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
My company has a "standard" of naming the machines like the following:
[F.I.][LastName]_[Speed in Mhz]
oh. yes... I kid you not.
WTF... so every time I get a new machine it needs to change, and every time it changes hands, it also needs to chance. Not to mention "_" is invalid in a host name but they don't care cause they dont even use DNS.. they just rely on WINS (*sigh*).
We have used many types:
:) and themes - classical, pop, swing, rap, blues, etc., Muppets, Star Trek characters, famous disasters (our titanic server went over better than the hindenburg, of course that one went over like a led zeppelin, but that one was in the rock group theme, but I digress).
3 letter site code/3 letter function code / two digit incremental - HQWGFS01 -west regional HQ - general file server - first installed server.
One lab used demonic names for a distributed processing group (each machine ran a daemon), but ran out after about three-dozen names (Northern Europe pagan religions gave us lots of names).
I ran through musical composers (or since they were so old, de-composers
The big concept is that in a small network, naming servers cute things is great (we had two backup servers in the muppet days named Statler and Waldorf - the guys that heckled people from the balcony). In a big network, you really need a structure that includes elements so you can find the server: location, function, NOS (or manufacturer), and an index number so that you can have several servers that do the same function. Also, start putting on labels on the hardware soon, or you will be paying in hell to find a server ever. I worked in a 40,000 user organization that had a server that blew something, and was spewing SNMP packets across the network. We finally needed to go to the network switch, and track the MAC to a port and trace the wire to the machine... Organization is important when you grow. That is what separates the big network people from the small network types. BUT, the small network guys usually have broader knowledge, since one person will work on NOS, backups, routers, switches, wiring, e-mail, etc. I have had both experiences.
Good luck in your growth.
Tim McMichael
What OS do you want to abuse today?
What OS do you want to abuse today?
My personal take on it: Stay away from dry, hard-to-remember hostnames. Try to come up with naming themes for any loosely groupable set of hosts, like character names or locations from The Simpsons, or from Star Trek, etc. Utilize host aliases to simplify what servers actually use to talk to each other, and to make life simple if you want to move a function from one server to another (eg, migrating the database server alias "oraprod" from hostname "ninja" to hostname "samurai"). Use the facilities within DNS. A lot. Take advantage of the HINFO and TXT RR types. Carve up subdomains by location or by department (or both).
Whatever you do, avoid at all costs the urge to compress all the above functionality into an 8-character hostname.
CLF
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
Any practical naming convention will not work. Sorry. So instead of trying to be practical have some fun.
For example the University I attended named all computers after biblical characters. Giving them memorable names usually made them easier to remember and therefore locate. Goliath, David, Tabitha, Timon, Melchizedek, etc.
If you aren't into the bible you could use Simpson characters or Star Trek characters, etc.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
I think the best way is to stay simple for the machine names, for example aix001, sun001 etc...
But then get fancy for services: If a machine is a database server then give it DNS aliases named after the database names, or the service it provides (nisslv01, dnssrv01, etc...). The problem will be that it can be messy to administrate the aliases themselves if you are not carefull
The pay off is twofold: Everybody knows what physical machine you are talking about when you say aix127 or sun255 or hpux001 AND it becomes really easy to move a service from one physical machine to another.
Another advice, keep machines names under 8 chars, we've seen apps that do not like > 8 chars.
Yves.
Personally, I name my machines after girls I've slept with (and use the sequence number in the IP).
It doesn't scale well, but it does make scaling much more fun; running out of names for machines is a definite reminder that I really need to get out more.
Just buy a big box of magnetic poetry words and
a pair of ten sided dice. Pick a word, roll the
dice and multiply. Catenate the word with the
number, and you're done.
The former ftp software (now acquired by NetManage) used to have servers named for sexual lubricants.
I work at a college Computing Center, so we have lots of machines to watch over. Each room has a theme (disney cartoon characters, planets, cars) and the machines in that room have those names (bullwinkle, jupiter, delorean). It's semi-easy to remember what is where.
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
Where I work, we have a tradition of naming servers after famous dead musicians. Routers are named after famous gay dead musicians. Our dev server is an Ultra 450 named hendrix. It sure is more fun, and easier to remember, than things like pdq12345. Based on our experience, I wholeleartedly recommend this and similar schemes.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain.
I've been using names of loa. Legba is our household router.
I remember a discussion somewhere that recommended making the CNAMEs equivalent to the IP address of the interface(s) on the server ("192.168.0.1" would be "192-168-0-1.example.org") and then using A records to alias the real hostnames ("alice", "tomservo", "gandalf") as well as roles ("www", "smtp", "dns").
The rationalization was, doing a reverse lookup on an easy-to-guess hostname would give you the IP of the machine, but doing a lookup on that IP wouldn't give you any useful information. ("www.example.org" could get you "192.168.0.1", but "192.168.0.2" would only get you "192-168-0-2.example.org"; if they know you've got a "gandalf.example.org" it kinda defeats the purpose, unless you don't follow any naming convention at all...)
The only headache I could see would be if you change IP addresses or subnets on a regular basis, especially for a large number of hosts; having to make 2 or 3 changes to your DNS entries might not be worth the trouble...
Jay (=
At my old work we used WWII naval ships. We mostly used American and British ships (since they are the easiest to spell :) ) There are tons of them. It also leads to office humer like...
"Hey, you sunk my battleship"
Since you are going to have 4000 server you will probably create sub domains.
You can use family structure to reflect that. For example cowboy.neals.domain.com.
Using family for sections of your network or functions of your servers.
Excellent - time for the Amiga's Guru Meditations to come back!
I started naming my machines using the theme "foods that begin with the letter Q". Not surprisingly, this list was quickly exhausted, so I modified it to simply be interesting words that begin with the letter Q. Some of my machines are:
- quiche
- quesadilla
- quince
- quahog
- quaff
- quisling
- quetzal
- quagmire
for 4000 machines, this is not practical.At work we _can_ choose any name we want, but we are _supposed_ to make sure the name includes are login ID, so that it's identifyable back to the user (this is for random user's workstations).
For a large data center, I would recommend a combination of (1) name based on function, (2) name based on location and (3) theme-based name based on personality (of the machine or of the namer). I would use (3) as the "real" name, and have both (1) and (2) as CNAMEs.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I started naming my machines using the theme "foods that begin with the letter Q". Not surprisingly, this list was quickly exhausted, so I modified it to simply be interesting words that begin with the letter Q. Some of my machines are:
- quiche
- quesadilla
- quince
- quahog
- quaff
- quisling (good name for a firewall)
- quetzal (actually this is my cell phone)
- quagmire (good name for a honey-pot machine)
For 4000 machines, this is obviously not practical.At work we _can_ choose any name we want, but we are _supposed_ to make sure the name includes our login ID, so that it's identifyable back to the user (this is for random user's workstations).
For a large data center, I would recommend a combination of (1) name based on function, (2) name based on location and (3) theme-based name based on personality (of the machine or of the namer). I would use (3) as the "real" name, and have both (1) and (2) as CNAMEs.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Themes are easier to remember and much less prone
to sudden inappropriateness - such as when your
department suddenly reorganizes and changes it's
name.
My home network is built around the server called
"oz", the other systems are ozma, glinda, dorothy,
auntem, scraps, etc. (for some reason, I wound up
using female names only. But someday I'll set up
tinman or tiktok.)
Pull out a scrabble dictionary, start with the six letter words, move on from there. Just don't use the ones that you hate. Leave a mark so that no name is used twice.
spike, jet, faye, ed, did I miss anyone?
Except they have to be dead first and they have to be musicians (so probably not including most pop stars). There's plenty to choose from as well. We've got a list of thousands still to use. I'm currently hanging out for Aaliyah.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
At a previous job, we struggled with this weighty issue. In the end, we used the names of mental illnesses for our firewall machines (paranoia is great for this), and the name of alcoholic beverages for the rest.
imagine trying to pronounce such shit in verbal communication...like when there's huge production problems going on, and you can't even pronounce the name of the fucking box without saying literally 14 syllables....wotta joke, and an absolutely terrible convention.
(Scratches wizened scruffy beard...) 'long about 1990 or so, I was sitting in a cube farm at Fidelity, and some young whippersnapper with too much hair was plinking away at an IBM PPC AIX machine while I was in earshot.
A crony sidles up, and says, "What's the name of this machine?"
Whippersnapper says, "Pittsburgh. That one over there's Gary. The one downstairs is Kawasaki."
"Kawasaki?"
"Steel towns. Heavy Iron. The IBM guys are pissed."
:-). (Probably not the actual city names, but you get the idea.)
---------- Financial Crypto is the Only Crypto That Matters
I figure this is the only place in the world that might appreciate my naming convention. By adding in all the autobots, decepticons and even the new predacons and combiners, you could probably have close to 100 names.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
With many servers in a data center potentially used by more than one customer, naming the servers after street location, row number, rack number, shelf number would be much more useful than trying for host names indicative of the customer. Then use DNS names for the more appropriately friendly names of the virtual machines used by customers.
Some customers will pay extra to have dedicated equipment, but many will gladly use a virtual system.
I personally name my servers after philosophers. Right now, Hegel is serving the web, Nietzsche is where I generally work from, and Kant ... is being Kant - mysterious and buggy. :)
We currently use the function system at work (web1, db3 and such). The only problem is that the sservers get recycled, functions changed and such. So now we have a db server that's really a web server, an application server that a db replication server, mail servers being web servers, and so on. None of the changes really needed a format or resetup.. just different services running, so the names stayed, but aren't that easy to follow.
Yeah, we do the same thing, but I have IP ranges for different kinds of servers... when one changes, I change IP's of the machines. If it runs both services, it is both web1 and db1; it claims both IPs. I don't know what I would do with 4000 machines though... Hopefully you could segment them into projects or teams as well as function. I'm wastefull with IPs, but I'll be ready for IPv6 :)
Karma Clown
Just imagine all the "download from Uranus" or "data dump from Uranus" jokes.
I don't even want to think about uploading...
Naming a computer by a bone name is a cool way to keep users connected. Perhaps best used as an alias for a service or what have you. People seem to like a nice word-name, plus they get to name a new machine they buy. Gets the user involved.
Then after they are all consumed, pick up a Greys anatomy and start in on the soft tissues. (best to avoid most sphincters and naughty bits.).
Also, if you have (say) a 16 bit subnet, you can make the third octect reflect things like location or purpose. Printers 240-255, Unix 200-240, Linux 160-200 and "Those other boxes" at 2-159.
Makes IP addressing a little more structured.
Best!
JDW
mysterious is the method we use...Server name is based on MAC address. Ensures uniqueness and that the entry in DNS will tell a potential hacker NOTHING. Posting from machine 00408103E355.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The uber-server (DHCP, Proxy, email, file, whole nine yards) is named Mr. Bill. As in "Oh, no, Mr. Bill!"
I'm the stranger...posting to