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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'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
Name them after pop-stars. Hey, Britney is down again. N-Sync has crashed.
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.
use 128 bit UUIDs... no collision!
AD87D0A9S8D90A9D80AD90ASD8A0D80F0A80D8F0AASD3
if that isn't easy to remember I don't know what is!
einstein
redford
lay
Name them all George. It might confuse hackers.
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 ..."
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.
Personally, I've thought about naming servers after sexually transmitted diseases. Imagine walking into a room: "Hey, can you check Syphylis? For some reason AIDS isn't talking to it."
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Yeah, if you're the admin for the local chemistry geek's club. JAYsus.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
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...)
Michael Jackson and the Seven Dwarfs just went down...?
"Just tell him ya did it! That's what he wants to hear anyway..."
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!
9A962BCC-97E0-4268-ABD4-FB5E7236DF64
AAEBD785-B9CB-405c-A09A-91719C979626
DDDFB01E-5979-454f-BE1E-175453F52127
Etc.
Then its sort of like remembering phone numbers. What, you can't rememberize 4000+ phone numbers? Then you buy ACT! or some other contact management software. Then you set up contact reminders to make you remember to ping the server to make sure its alive or back it up. Your reminder list probably wouldn't be more than a few hundred entries on each day. You could polish that off before lunch. Then ask for a raise because you solved the problem without doing hardly any work! Thats reusability, and they pay people a lot to be good at it you know.
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.
With my luck, my box would end up being Ununnilium or Ununbium.
All of our servers are named after mythological/horoscopic characters/creatures, ie Hercules, Athena, Draco, Aries, Phoenix, etc. Works for us. They were originally given names like TTIBDC01, TTIBDC02, etc. Not only more confusing, it doesn't sound as cool in conversation.
"So, did you install that latest patch on Phoenix?" sounds a lot better than "Updated TTIBDC01 lately?"
Of course, with that many servers, you're better off naming them with random character strings. Here, I'll get you started...
for($i=0;$i<4000;$i++)
$hostname[] = md5(rand(0,(float) microtime() * 10000000));
:D
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
That's no moon.
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
No, you just start using the RGB hex. I'm 000088, a nice shade of blue.
Actually, he's probably referring to the three living dwarves. Only Grumpy, Bashful and Doc are still alive.
Sleepy was killed in 1968 when he accidently drove off a cliff (most people who know Sleepy dispute the police report that indicated alcohol was to blame).
Sneezy died of natural causes in 1973 (pollen counts were extremely high that year).
Happy and Dopey were found dead in a hotel room in 1982 of an aparent heroin overdose.
I have already paid for my sin, don't make it worse by modding my up.
Lasers Controlled Games!
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'
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
Great, I'm color blind. Try explaining to your boss why you just formatted the brown sever when you were supposed to do the green one.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I use capital cities.
Like NEWYORK, SALTLAKECITY, and SPRINGVILLE?
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Just as long as you name the 5th element "Lilu" :-)
Moron is a good element too.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
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."
and do you call the win2k box uranus?
It is now named Urectum.
You mean you don't have to pick the names for your servers from the Lord of the Rings...??
RMN
~~~
Sounds cool. The Win2K servers could be JDean, BHolly, Pre, AEarhart...
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Imagine yelling any of the following in to a cell phone while in public ...
"Brenda went down? When? How long?"
"Hey, I just checked the logs, and someone has been fingering Mike!"
"Well, mount Jennifer and see what happens."
"Probe Mark and make sure there are no leaks."
"Yeah, Martha is one of the SCSI ones"
etc, etc, etc.
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
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" ...
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.
-Derek
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.