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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.
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
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use 128 bit UUIDs... no collision!
AD87D0A9S8D90A9D80AD90ASD8A0D80F0A80D8F0AASD3
if that isn't easy to remember I don't know what is!
einstein
redford
lay
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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."
+ 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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."
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 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.
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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!
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. :)
Michael Jackson and the Seven Dwarfs just went down...?
"Just tell him ya did it! That's what he wants to hear anyway..."
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
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
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!
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.
The CIA World Factbook is my friend for that.
He probably means the atomic number...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
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 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
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 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$
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
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).
That would've been really appropriate for an AT&T 3B1...how old was that job? :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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
That's why I name all of our machines using that pygmy click-language.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
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.
Did you ever have moons of Saturn in your list of "space-related" things? If so, that might just overlap a bit with the mythological stuff ;)
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
The most useful server naming resource on the net is probably The Dictionary of Arda.
... 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
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!
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.
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
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.
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!
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
[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.
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
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'
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.
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
4 letter company abbreviation (we merged recently, and this saved our asses) + 2 letter site location + 2 letter function + 2 number ID. so, for instance, a server in the Ontario, Canada data center that is a SQL server would be:
xxxxONDB01.
It only varies for Domino servers and Web servers where they get 3 letters for function. LD for Lotus Domino and then D or M for whether they are exclusively a database server or a database and mail server. And WBX for external web server, and WBI for internal web servers
DC = domain controller
FS = File server
PS = Print server
DB = Database server. whether it Oracle, DB2, or SQL, it's all the same.
LDx = Lotus Domino server
EX = Exchange Server
NS = Domain Name Server (implies WINS server as well)
WBx = Web server
FW = Firewall
RT = Router
SW = Managed Switch
HB = Managed Hub
Haven't had any problems with renaming servers, mostly because it's frowned upon to repurpose a server without formatting it first. That, and we're real strict about keeping dedicated servers for most things. The plus of this is that I can immediately telnet to Hong Kong's file server without having to call the local admin and figure out the name of it. Some of our locations are a little ambigous with their 2 letter abbreviation, but after you've seen a few of them, you pick it up pretty quick. I've been meaning to put the 2 letter city codes and function codes in a policy handout, but haven't had the time, so it's more of an informal thing between site admins right now.
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. ^^
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]
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!
And we've used the names of islands off the west coast of north america. So? How'll that expand to 4000 machines in an 8 character namespace? The only suggestion so far that makes any sense at all is the one given by the article poster. :P
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
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!
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.
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
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
name them after all the companies that went under. FINALLY a good use for :digital::convergance:!!
I use capital cities.
Like NEWYORK, SALTLAKECITY, and SPRINGVILLE?
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
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
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.
Why bother naming them? They never come when you call.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
Uhm.. MX is the common accepted abbreviation for Mail Exchange, it's used in DNS entries, etc.
What?
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.
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.
..."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.
How about the names of anonymous and first posters on slashdot. There should be a limitless number of those.
We run a domain called "cosmos".
That was kinda kewl, 'cos I can sorta pick any of a variety of objects out of the sky to name things after. So, one class of servers can be stars, another planets, another moons.
Comets are also an option. As are man-made objects.
Was gonna name one nasty NT server Mir there for a while, for very obvious reliability-related reasons.
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
When naming machines gets 600+ posts!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
But not Greek gods. That's just passe.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
One word: Pokemon.
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.
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
Isn't it obvious? Call them all Bruce. *dodges hurled tomatoes*
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, until you have to tell your boss "Dammit, Chewie just went down on me."
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Top Cool Server Hostnames
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
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" ...
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.
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.
-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.
Whim of the sysadmin that particular day (Smeghead)
Heh. That's pretty much how a company I used to work for wound up with a FreeBSD box named 'ntsucks'. It was a NAT/ipf/Squid proxy that replaced a troublesome NT machine that servers the same function. Higher-ups later made the guy that did it change the name, so our remote logins to customer boxen didn't come from ntsucks.company.com.
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*).
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.
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 (=
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