Best DNS Naming Scheme For Small/Medium Businesses?

Bandman writes "My business just purchased a couple dozen blades, and with our existing servers, this brings us to around 60 machines. We're geographically dispersed, and most of the users who need to connect to servers are not technical (if that matters). We used to use theme-based naming schemes, but we've been migrating to a more utilitarian system. I think it's clearer and more concise, but I've had some feedback from users who didn't find it understandable. What do you use for your internal DNS schemes? How big is your network, and what do you recommend for future expansion? Does it matter to your users at all?"

Comments

No acroynms, use short names/words

[Yvan256]

The best suggestion I can think of right now is to use short names or words and NOT use acronyms, because you'll end up with lots of people either not remembering the acronyms (typing them with typos) and/or not remembering which acronyms are associated with what.

Using something that should be familiar to most employes and not offensive to anyone would also help, especially when they call for tech support.

As a reference, on my network at home all the computers, servers and even devices have names from the Metroid games (Zebes, Samus, SR388, etc).

Re:An example

[Dr_Harm]

Depending on your business, you may not need all those things. The original post asks about "small/medium" business... but when you have that many machines, you're clearly a 'medium' business. Small businesses don't need all that.

Also, why are people so hesitant to use multiple levels of DNS domains? Couldn't that server also be named mark-pfs-01.sjc.whatever.com? That way, everyone in SJC knows it just as "marketing production file server 01". Only people off-site need to realize that it's in SJC.

Re:An example

[arth1]

A good host name should denote the following:

-location
-department/cost center
-purpose
-prod/stage
-some sort of serial # to make it easy

Depending on how your sites are named (I like using airport codes but it might not scale right for your org), you could wind up with:

sjcmarkfilep01

This is the worst advice I've seen so far, but far too common, alas.

It breaks the rule that the server name should be easy to say over the phone, and that no single typo should cause an issue.
Try playing chinese whispers over the phone with sjcmarkfilep01 a few times, and you'll see why it is stupid. Heck, just try to talk someone through entering the name.
And then someone makes a typo, instructing support to install a new card in sfcmarkfilep01, which also happens to exist, and be vital for San Fransisco operations. An oops that could have been avoided with a smarter and typo-resistant naming system.

Also, why avoid subdomains? What's wrong with marketing.sanjose.internal? That way, you can do "ping dns" and reach dns.marketing.sanjose.internal, and ask someone to take a look at the secondary file server without having to spell out sjcmarkfilep02.

Anyhow, if you want convoluted names like these, make them secondary names. There's nothing that would prevent peter.sgi.com from also being known as b.dns.internal.sgi.com.