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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."
This lets you distinguish between the server number in a rotation (the second element) and the specific service it is supporting (the first element).
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.
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
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
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.)
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!
Very interesting.
Of historical interest, from the RFC (written in 1990): "Extremely well-known hostnames such as 'sri-nic' and 'uunet' should be avoided since they are understood in conversation as absolute addresses even without a domain." I consider myself a bit of an old-timer, but though I recognize uunet, I've never even heard of sri-nic. I'm sure someone knows about this; please inform!
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.
That's stupid. Now if I move the server from one rack space to another, or upgrade it to a different platform then all my users have to change the config on any applications that reference the server? Not a long term scalable solution.
Keep location and platform information in a seperate document or database. Or create HINFO records in DNS.
On the subject of execs:
I'm a student at Stanford, and one of my profs set up a lab a couple years back where each of the workstations was a logical operation. And, Xor, Nand, Or, Iff, etc.
The server was called "gates", because each of these is a logic gate.
Then, Bill Gates donated money and there was going to be a Gates Computer Science building.
Needless to say, my prof lost his name pretty damn quickly, and old Bill was relented to.