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Why Do We Name Servers the Way We Do?
jfruhlinger writes "If you use a Unix machine, it probably has a funny name. And if you work in an environment where there are multiple Unix machines, they probably have funny names that are variations on a theme. No, you're not the only one! This article explores the phenomenon, showing that even the CIA uses a whimsical server naming scheme." What are some of your best (worst?) naming schemes?
h t t p colon slash slash slash dot dot org
Old Reader's Digest Joke:
Seven terminals named Doc, Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, . . ., and a printer named "Handsome Prints". :-)
My main server (which used to break all the time) is named Ultron, while various other computers and printers on the network have names such as Zebranki, Greenish, and Spathi.
Nothing says 'welcome to the neighborhood' like a gunny sack full of dead squirrels.
Anybody else seeing black text on a black background? Or perhaps more accurately, not seeing it?
Anyways: I used to name my machines acronyms (SNAFU), but I later decided on naming them after AIs. My laptop is called Microvac (formerly Hal 9000 but I decided it wasn't a good name for a laptop) and my desktop is P1.
I like that in this edition of Duplicate Stories on /. Monthly, the link in the story actually links back to a previous story that's asking the same thing! Thanks for saving us the few seconds of searching for the older stories on this one /.!
A goofy naming scheme is a bad idea when you're running over 100 servers in a dynamic environment. When your servers are named after wines, cheeses, and trees, who can say what Oak does, or Chablis, or Feta, or Jujuba, or Sassafras, ad nauseum.
-r0
My computers at home are named after females in music. Other devices on my network are named after female fairy tale figures.
-- Cheers!
My firewall is the adult filter on the other network.
My server at home is called "compute0". Guess why. It's because I expect eventually to build another one and call it "compute1". Heh.
On the other hand, the desktop and notebook computers do have somewhat more interesting names. They include:
hermione
epimetheus
quechua
tzeltal
basque
zapotec
The last three are the most recent. I'm on a language kick.
...after spending the entire Christmas break re-installing and re-configuring a friend's Win98 box one year, when its harddrive failed. We named it "The Grinch".
If you use a Unix machine, it probably has a funny name.
Well, let's see:
Nothing odd there, it's just a reef triggerfish.
Naming our machines in odd and amusing ways it our way of secretly rebelling against over management.
thunder and Distiney, but I have no idea about the reasons behind their names (public school)
I name all my Unix servers after famous eunuchs.
Of course we are not so United States centric, so I think we are moving towards names like PS23, GW32, etc. More efficient, but at what cost.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I name each of my servers the name of another computer's mac address on the network. This way, as part of my retirement package I'll have the joyous knowledge that the person who takes over my position is going insane.
functional naming.
Machines need arbitrary names, functional names are aliases.
I used to run a fairly lucrative business at a time when a certain industry was much more profitable... JennaJameson would always go down while RonJeremy would always be up.
Coincidence? I think not.
Use this convention for naming servers. company - airport code - role. For example, MSFT-PDX-MAIL01 (or DC01, TS01, APP01, etc)
Life is not for the lazy.
Just like my user name, I decided to go with the word "snow" in various languages. So far, I have my router chioni, server nix, desktop losse, and various other names for components. My wii is yuki, my xbox 360 is xue, my ipod touch is lumi. Beyond that I've also used "eira" and "schnee".
At my university NMSU, the CS department used alcoholic drinks (vodka, gin, etc), which were changed to vehicles (cobra, stingray) over complaints from an incoming professor. The sunrays were "bear" in various languages (oso, medved, ursa), and later they had words from the hacker's dictionary (foo, bar, baz, frob)
The naming schemes all were easily memorable, and prompted word associations, making them easy to mentally group. Ok, except the translations for bears, (and mine for snow) except for fellow crazy polyglots, and linguiphiles.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
We name all of our servers after godzilla monsters. Megalon, Rodan, Sog ( Son of Godzilla ), godzilla, gargantua etc....
It was the network engineer before I that came up with this.. but we kept to the naming scheme. And of course, we have " print ".
Ninnle Two, Ninnle Three, Ninnle Four, Ninnle Five, Ninnle Six, Ninnle Seven....
My T60 laptop is called t60. My Antec computer is called antec. My media server is called mythtv.
Names should have meaning.
We use to use famous computers. Can you tell where these came from? The first one is a gimme!
HAL
WOPR
CHROME
MYCROFT
OZ
BCE
etc.
Why not name them "prod01", "prod02", "dev01", "staging01", etc? It makes no sense at all to name them "happy", "goofy", and "Voldemort". All that does it add possible confusion. All you need to do is have a new hire forget for a moment that "Dolphin" is your five-nines-must-be-up-at-all-costs production database and "Porpoise" is your office quake server to have a massive, highly costly, possibly fatal failure... If you aren't naming your servers what they ARE, instead of some idiot meaningless name, you are a bad sysadmin who is just adding one more point of failure to an already complex system, simple as that.
Want to argue with me? Answer me this: Why it's a best practice when coding to name the "Total annual cost" variable something like "totalAnnualCost" instead of "HappyZippers"?
I worked with some guys who brought up a cluster of machines named with disease names. I think one was 'schistosomiasis' (not sure of the spelling)
The users didn't like the idea of logging into diseases and something else was eventually put in place.
The Druggars have been a great gift to our server farm.
George Foreman, though he has many kids - not so much.
Taken individually, the names "trojan", "ramses" and "sheik" may not mean much, but taken together... Took a while for the boss to pick up on that theme...
Ugh,
chosen by the previous sysadmin, pokemon charaters. pickachu was the only box people would use because they had no idea what I was talking about when I said charmeleon or wartortle or whatever the other 20 odd boxes were.
I had a series of Macs before I became a diehard Linux guy. I didn't know I could name the first one, but then came Mac and Cheese, Mac Truck and Fanfare for the Common Mac (around the time of Copeland).
Why? Because I could.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Over the years, I've named my machines Jazz, Blues, Fusion, HipHop, Rockabilly, and my new iPod touch is named Reggae.
At one place I worked, we named our servers after AI characters from movies. I knew I finally had some clout when I got to choose the names for a handful of new ones we got in. I named them Rachel, Zora, Pris, Leon, Roy and Deckard, that group, of course, being a sub-theme (one of my fave movies) within the theme.
The CB App. What's your 20?
...is the system I use in my consulting business to do electrical load flow analysis for various utility customers.
Because if you give it the wrong command, it can shut down the grid.
Have gnu, will travel.
I name my PCs/Servers by the core name of the CPU:
;)
My desktop is "Agena" (Phenom X4)
Laptop is "Trinidad" (Turion X2)
Wife's Laptop is "Merom" (Celly)
File Server is "Sparta" (AM2 Sempron)
I've been doing this for years and it's a built in reminder that I need to upgrade whenever I connect to another machine.
Over time, systems get refactored for uses that they were not originally intended, so that box named web1 is now an ftp server and nobody bothered to rename it. The same happens when you try to name them by physical location. r1a2r10n5 got moved from Room 1, Aisle 2, Rack 10, Number 5 to another room entirely.
The easiest time I had dealig with servers was when they were named after japanese monsters. We had Godzilla, Mothra, etc. We all know that Godzilla was the PostresSQL server. If a box's purpose changed, we didn't have to worry about renaming it and people would eventually learn its new purpose.
Whimsical names work.
-- Will program for bandwidth
One group at JPMorgan had unix boxes named "Marx" (yes after Carl Marx) and "Bucky" (yes after Buckminster Fuller), and a slew of other Dead Utopian Philosophers.
Naturally the program that the group developed (in Visual Works Smalltalk with the Gemstone Object Database) for Trading Hybrid Derivatives is known as "Das Kapital"! Yes, it also has a start up screen with a picture of good old Carl Marx. This program trades and manages Trillions of Dollars of value (although the total value dropped recently due to, well, you know). But, was this program was likely part of the problem? Who knows? ;--)
My systems are named after death related things... styx (the router/river that connects everything), charon (the file server that shepherds around the data), hell (web/ftp/mail server and the place where the users belong), death (the desktop where I enact all of my nefarious deeds), etc. I do it mostly so I don't get the urge to act upon those impulses. Ok, I do it mostly because nobody else names their servers like that and naming them after states, elements, etc seemed too cliche.
Odd named hosts often have a meaning once you are clued in on the naming scheme. First off it really helps to give hosts on the network a NAME not just a number. You could just skip DNS if you are going to number em. A well thought out naming scheme helps. If you do it right the name gives you a rough idea what it does and still allows some fun in naming.
If I see a tree themed hostname I instantly know it is one of the machines in a patron lab. Flowers are staff hosts and mythological beings are in the server room. Yes machines in a lab could just be numbered but ya could also name yer cats Cat 1, Cat 2, Cat 3, etc.
Democrat delenda est
I name mine after logicians. My desktop is Aristotle and my laptop is Ockham. I have also had Frege and Boole.
I worked at a shop where every client and server was named after the Dell Service tag. It did help identify the box, but made it awfully cumbersome to identify what the server was for without checking the inventory system; which had all that annotated in it. However, it worked well for the clients because we could have users find the service tag Dell had printed on the front of the box very quickly so we could remote in over the phone.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
I name all of my physical machines after some variation on truth, typically truth in a foreign language (Verita, Pravda). I name my virtual machines running on those machines after guns (Colt, Beretta).
Currently operating:
Marvin (server)
Hactar (laptop)
Vroomfondel (backup server)
No longer functional:
Arthur
Colin
Prosser
Prefect
Majikthise
Zarniwoop
Silly enough for you?
The admin before me loved The Simpsons - it's especially funny when one of the servers crashes, and someone yells 'Hey, Homer just went down on me!'
(Yes, there's a similar bash.org quote involving Pokemon, but this actually happens)
The machines we have at work are named after various characters from the Lord of the Rings books (including the Silmarillion).
I use character's from Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics. Machine I'm typing from is the second incarnation of Morpheus (a dark and broody dell desktop), to my right I have Rose (a mac laptop) and a machine called Destruction (an acquisition from a previous job which is the only machine in the house which dual bots into an MS product...) and my EEE is dubbed Barbie.
Over the years, I've had most of the main cast represented in this way for various reasons which all made perfect sense at the time :-).
Guess what distro it runs ;)
All my computers are named after famous computerists. For example, Welchman. Turing. Babbage. (The exception is my old laptop, named after Richard Hammond.)
My phones are also given surnames: Stubblefield, Adams, etc.
All my iPods are called Steve.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
my servers are all named after computer parts so that users sound like retards asking for anything
"i need full access to ram!"
"why is megabytes broken?!?"
"who rebooted hard drive??!??"
http://qdb.us/294682
Well, not any in specific, just female names that I like. For some I haven't ever met someone with that name (as simple as Linda).
It feels nicer. More personal?
But those are for desktops. Maybe for servers I'd give them boys names, because they do heavy lifting while I play around with the girls. =)
All my Unix machines/routers/etc are named after places or things in Kevin Smith movies.
.. and last but not least, my NAS is called Quicker Stop
-My MythTV machine is called RSTVideo
-My router is called Quickstop Groceries
-My Fileserver is called Postens Funeral Home
-My Hackintosh is called Mooby's
I have desktops named batman, joker, batgirl, robin, twoface, and riddler, a server named alfred, and my linux laptop named penguin.
The CS department at my school has a couple Windows labs that follow this naming trend and named all the machines after presidents and Simpsons characters. A couple of our Linux labs are named for "Sports" and "weapons" lab. When you ssh into that lab you are randomly assigned a terminal. I just love seeing
[ab672@katana]$
or
[ab672@jujitsu]$
However, my personal favorite, has to be the mac lab - the fruit lab, likely so named for those who work there...
I used to manage several data centers and the development on had the most interesting name because the system administrators and they would name the servers from characters or locations in their books they were reading.
You can tell they were reading Star Trek if they named the servers "Kirk" or "Borg".
The most mundane were the production server with Mail-DB-01 and Web-apps-01. However you knew what the server did just by looking at the name.
"Unable to connect to database server"
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
There's a pretty sizeable collection of funny/clever server names on Stack Overflow here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/262657/the-coolest-server-names
Sturgeon was an optimist.
I name the servers I have license to do so after mythical places. The name/place reflects the nature of the machine (firewall, file server, workstation, winders box, remote host).
I'd link them up with actual names, but I've already said too much.
So when something goes wrong, people sound like morons: "Why is motherboard down!?" "I can't connect to RAM!"
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Great idea! Let's name the others "Mickey", "Minnie", and "Pluto"
Since our former domain was feather.net, my brother and I started naming machines after birds. The plus side is that there's a great many bird names to use, and we can be somewhat descriptive (the tiny shuttle box is named finch, while the great massive ugly slow beast was named condor, and one machine that was resurrected from the dead was re-christened phoenix).
As for my desktops, the first was lazarus (now retired), followed by minerva and athena, and my laptop is dora. Still a theme, just a different one. (My iPod is hamadryad)
The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. -- John Gilmore
I named my first external hard drive "Flying Toaster" due to its portability and my love of the old After Dark screensavers... it died of severe overheating, what a coincidence. I named its replacement "Not A Toaster"... so far so good. As for my computers, I have a couple random names but no common theme and definitely no effect on their performance. My main one is called Kefka after the Final Fantasy VI character. I have an old Gateway named Moo and a Dell from 2003 that is named Powerhouse because it is somehow STILL able to play new games on reasonable settings. My old 486 is named Senior Citizen and my equally old Mac is named Crapple because it is very slow and useless. I used to name ALL my hard drives, but then I stopped. I had on my old Pentium 2 setup a 12 gig named Dust Bunny and a 40 gig named Death Star. I should get back into naming!
I highly recommend reading RFC 1178
The first naming scheme I saw was a group of then-new Sun 3 workstations that were named after cheeses. The NFS server was chedder. How creative!
Where I currently work, the names are cars. I've had twingo, tatra and model-t, while our new wickedly fast server was, naturally, veyron. The system I'm typing this on is a little crude but brutally fast: monaro.
Going a very long way back, when I was with Digital the DECnet node names were limited to 6 characters, but some of them were interesting. The main box at an office in Arizona was TOOHOT. GATORS? Florida, naturally. How could SRFSUP be anywhere but L.A.?
...laura
Our CS computers here at Xavier University are named after various xmen characters. Cyclops, iceman, wolverine, ... our printer xmansion and the wireless network hands out mutant0...mutantN.
jesusjones
basil - for Toni
astley (of course for Rick)
numan - for Gary Numan
vice (for Vanilla Ice)
nena
falco
knack
axelf
buggles
dolby - although I argued that Thomas Dolby was not a one-hit wonder, she blinded me with Science simply was too much to overcome.
Ok, this drives me nuts. It's a little off topic, since it's names of conference rooms instead of server names, but the concept is the same.
Here in Colorado, we have 54 mountain peaks that are > 14,000 feet. They're referred to as "fourteeners," and they all (of course) have names.
Every company in Denver thinks they're damn clever by naming their conference rooms after the fourteeners. I don't know how many Long's Peak and Mount Evans conference rooms I've sat in, but it makes me want to hurl my chair at the window.
Ok, time for my anger management class. =p
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
When I used to work for a real company we'd name our servers after different (usually ethnic) foods - our first was named Kimchee (from our Korean designer). Then came Halo Halo (Philippino dessert), Pork Bun, and head cheese. And right before I left... Debbie Gibson for some reason from the new dev.
It was actually a good social exercise - every time we got a new server we had the next employee "in line" name it. Good times. These days I use Bacon, Eggs, Lau Lau, and Loco Moco, for those of you partial to Hawaiian food! I love telling people to set their domain nameservers to bacon.site.com and eggs.site.com.
Why would this be limited to just Unix boxes? I've seen plenty of windows, mac, linux, etc network servers with the same kind of strange naming conventions.
Yes, I use alcoholic beverages, such as cognac, vodka, beer, etc. I actually don't drink much >.>
My machines are named fray, tangle, snarl, and knot, respectively.
My favorite naming convention?: Our rules for selecting the naming convention for a set of Sun workstations and server, back in the late '80s:
1. Must support at least 5 machines
2. Must have no name in the scheme already in the company (which had a lot of computers)
3. Extra credit for a good name for the server.
"James Bond Villains" was the winning scheme. Drax, Goldfinger, Dr_No (my machine!), etc. Server was called Spectre, of course! (And good ol' Spectre, a mid-size sun server lasted until it was shut down in 1999 because it was running SunOS rather than Solaris, and Sun didn't support Y2K updates for SunOS...) We were all excited because Spectre had a 'double eagle' huge disk drive, a full 600mb!
At home, we use mostly mythical names. My old PowerBook was named Pegasus (because it was a very fast machine when I got it.) Our first dual-CPU G5 Mac is called Janus (the Roman 2-headed god.) My wife's iMac, with the built-in Webcam on the top of the machine, is called Cyclops (of course!) My current MacBook is called Cerberus (3-headed dog of the underworld), since I intend to support all 3 of MacOS, Linux and Windows under virtualization (but I haven't gotten around to installing the Linux partition yet.) The Windows partition on that machine has its own name, Hecate a dark, evil bitch... :-)
dave
If some Bastard Operator named one: divide_by_zero?
And we name our Win boxen silly names too - every Linux or Unix or Windows box in my lab is named after a local animal (Linux or Unix) or local plant (Windows).
It's the same reason that people have nicknames for their campers and their houses ... or the CIA is named Foggy Bottom.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"slashdotted". In memory of what happened to the old one.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Splinter(head node)
Leonardo
Donatello
Rafael
Michelangelo
Just a little make-shift cluster for large Blender renders implemented with Dr. Q. Splinter told the turtles what to do.
ASSassin
Asian Student Society...assin. A gentoo box built for hosting a website for Asian Student Interest Advocates.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
At one place i worked, it started out as cartoon characters (McBain was our main server), then degenerated to random things (zippy, pinto. "Why pinto" "Why NOT!!")
The next place had 'a swear word in a foreign language'. Our internet server was 'haole'. My favorite there was 'sega' which is a swearword in Amharic, but also, well, Sega, which was a few blocks over.
My physics research group has a bunch of weird Japanese names: Fugu, Basashi, Himo, Shirako, Ebi...
I had no idea what these meant at first, but they're all crazy Japanese delicacies.
Fugu=Poisonous Pufferfish
Basashi=Horse meat
Ebi=LIVE baby shrimp
Shirako=Fish semen
Himo=?????
Typically, the pattern that I see is a bunch of names picked more-or-less-randomly from a pool of related things. For example, a bunch of servers named after LOTR characters (frodo, bilbo, etc.) or facilities named after ancient Romans (CESR and CLEO), mail programs named after trees (elm, pine, cone). Yadda yadda yadda...
As I see it, this pattern reflects the fact that the people have unique personalities while the machines pretty much don't. The humans adopt or join a naming scheme in order to express themselves a bit, while the individual names aren't that important. After all, the computers don't care about the names.
My bicyles
When I was doing undergrad one of my professors set up a Unix server (Eowyn & backup Eomer) with workstations named after places in Middle Earth: Rivendell, Mirkwood, Bree, Edoras, Moria, etc.
A college friend and I had a Dune theme going on at one point with our own setup: usernames Muuadib and Irulan on a box named Arrakis.
We liked our printer named "Out of Paper." We did not have much problem with others wanting to use it!
I can suggest reading rfc1178 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178).
It contains some common-sense advice about host naming. Here's a sample:
I'm so far successfully naming my boxes after moons in the solar system. Pro: you can think of the boxes as A, B, C, etc., but let them have more interesting names than that.
Anime characters should be fine too. Usagi, Chiyo-Chan, Sakura, ... :D
Or you could go for slashdot memes... natalie-portman, cowboyneal, in-soviet-russia, car-analogy, etc... ;-)
The author of this article apparently doesn't realize tons of devices require/ask for names now, not only the normal PC (Unix or not), but cellphones, music players, etc.
I don't run any servers, but I name my various computers/devices based on Kaiju movies roughly ordered by size and/or popularity.
My Vista desktop is Godzilla, natch. The Mac G5 media server is Gamera. The 13" Tablet PC is Mothra, the 10" MSI Wind is Rodan. The 80GB Zune is Gaos and the iPhone is Garuda.
It's actually pretty pathetic now that I think about it...
Comment of the year
We name all of our computers (small company) after the different moons in our solar system.
Our usenet upstream provider used to call their main server Pants. Their admin said, "If pants is down, we're fucked."
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
Gomco, Mogen, Plastibell...
Guess where I consulted once.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
My systems are named after famous places, and the hard drives named by the first names of people who made that place famous. My MacBook Pro, and related drives: Los Alamos Robert (Oppenheimer) - internal drive Albert (Einstein, ... Okay, somewhat related, this was my original internal drive, now an external)
John (Von Neumann)
Leo (Szilard, again, only slightly related)
My PC / media system: Kitty Hawk
Wilbur
Orville
I used to have my PC drives partitioned and named after the five Space Shuttles, and the system was called Canaveral.
I have under 30 servers. The names help me to personalize them like people. Makes it real easy for me to remember smaller things about the individual servers. The naming schemes allow me to quickly get another name for a server when I need it.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I had 3 servers in a lab environment 6 years ago that I named Huey, Duey and Louie. The bad thing with using a theme is that it does not indicate what the function of the server is to anyone and only the person who named them knows what they do. Using a coded scheme is much better if you want to be able to share the knowledge of what the servers do, where they are, and what node is which (if you are using redundant servers to distinguish betwee node A and node B, etc.). You can always name them officially using that scheme both within the servers' configurations and in DNS using the A (or AAAA for IPv6) records but then insert CNAME records for aliases using a more entertaining theme if you so desire. I would prefer an alias for a domain controller such as DC1 instead of DeathStar. Whimsical names are all well and good for a lab environment but real production servers need useful names that all people can identify easily and accurately especially if your operations span countries. Is someone in another country going to know what DeathStar really is? They might but not necessarily; less familiar themes would have even less recognition to be helpful.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Over the years I have named groups of servers after:
Aircraft carriers (was working for the Navy and somebody Up Above thought it would be a good idea)
Ex boyfriends--to everybody else it was just a group of guys' names
Ice cream flavors
Movie monsters--apparently a favorite of several other people
Cars
I also had a workstation named Elvis because in those faraway days you could type:
"ping Elvis"
and get the answer:
"Elvis is alive..."
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
I used to call my home computers after the monty pythons. But i ran out of names. Now i use Startcraft units' names and i think they will be enough for a long, long time
(i.e. until Starcraft II gets released)
Simple numbering schemes work ok in a flat network architecture, but I think part of the reason people frequently use geographic names, or other structures is that they are ready metaphors for mappings that are already in our heads, and works very well for branching systems. Human brains are great pattern matching engines, especially when there are associations made, but learning the associations also seems to require a bit of novel thought (like learning the names of the planets by using a sentence whose words starts with the same letters as the planets). People remember words better than numbers - one of the reasons we use nameservers to connect to sites rather than remember ip addresses.
The problem arises is that what is easy to remember for one person is not so easy for another, if the association is too esoteric (like names of alternative music groups, or something like that).
If you do it right host names don't matter. The important thing is Service names.
Server foo.bar.com may host HTTP proxies, mail, NFS shares or whatever. Create CNAMES for the services. Never expose the "foo" name for public services. ftp.bar.com may then move freely without being tied to some specific host.
Number the service names. Almost any non-trivial service will need to be duplicated if your organization grows. ftp.bar.com should be ftp01.bar.com, because there will eventually need to be an ftp02.
Host names can be made to reflect geography. This is helpful in large organizations. jane.boston-colo-01.bar.com. You've separated the service names from the host names, so none of that administratively helpful geographical noise is exposed to the public.
Do these three things and you've solved 98% of the problem. The rest won't be suffered long enough to worry about before someone else takes over and reorganizes the whole shebang anyhow.
Now that you've liberated the service names from the host names feel free to employ whatever amusing server naming scheme you wish. I find dictator names are fun; stalin, chavez, pinochet, etc. The shorter the better.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
(ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2100.txt)
The Naming of Hosts is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a host must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the users use daily,
Such as venus, athena, and cisco, and ames,
Such as titan or sirius, hobbes or europa--
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the web pages, some for the flames:
Such as mercury, phoenix, orion, and charon--
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a host needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can it keep its home page perpendicular,
And spread out its data, send pages world wide?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Like lothlorien, pothole, or kobyashi-maru,
Such as pearly-gates.vatican, or else diplomatic-
Names that never belong to more than one host.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover--
But THE NAMESERVER KNOWS, and will us'ually confess.
When you notice a client in rapt meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
The code is engaged in a deep consultation
On the address, the address, the address of its name:
It's ineffable,
effable,
Effanineffable,
Deep and inscrutable,
singular
Name.
One company I worked for (a now-defunct .com) had a requirement that servers be named after geographic features.... the companies first 5 servers were Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Antarctic.
I started the practice of "clustering" server names. Countries in Asia were for finance, North America were for web servers, and the like.
Another company (another now-defunct .bomb, what a horrible place to work) named servers kind-a in the same sort of manner. Barn animals (horses, sheep, etc) were the web servers, range animals (cows, bison, etc) were the servers that ran the business. Individual PCs were named after the person's favorite breed of cat/dog/fish/etc. Mine was "Wolverine", NOT a reference to the comic.
Zeus - Domain
Hercules - backup domain
Rhea - print controller
Hades - exchange server
Hera - accounting SQL server
Iris - license server
Echo - archive server
Nike - File server
I've got a friend who names all his machines after foods, but in Danish. Hence kartoffel (dumpling), aebelskiver (Danish pancake balls, apparently), waffle, etc..
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
Malacoda and Scarmiglione are my current machines. Rubicante died.
When I run out, then I'll move on to the angels.
My naming scheme is female AI's and/or robots: Major (Quake 3 bot), futura (robot from Metropolis), galatea (living statue from mythology), shodan (from the game System Shock), glados (from the game Portal).
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Fezzic is my desktop, Vizzini is my laptop, Miracle Max is my NSLU2 running Debian, and Humperdinck is my mail server.
easy enough. hell of a lot easier to remember a named system that a "resource" system. IE, try to remember "DCRM_VPNT1_03" vs. "BORG3" I have a tendency to name servers after who they remind me of. Kind of like personification. For instance, my home media server is "Goku," because i built it in 2000, and ever few years it just keeps getting more power-ups. Never dies.
Yes, I name my servers after mythological beings, too.
I remember a lab with over two dozen workstations named after cheeses. It made for interesting emails from users when they crashed, such as "Mozerella is melting down again!"
Fictional computers. Colossus (the Forbin Project), Neuromancer & Wintermute (more AIs than Computers), Deep Thought, Red Queen (resident evil), and of course HAL 9000
Our main domain is based of 24 and named CTU. Each server on said domain is a character from 24; Bauer, Palmer, Chloe, and so on. Our secondary domain is based off Lost and is named Dahrma. The servers on this domain are named after characters from Lost; Sawyer, Locke, Echo, and so on.
We used characters from Looney Tunes: Daffy, Daisy, Bugs, Tweety, Sylvester, etc. Granny was the VPN server guardian :)
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
I got in trouble for following the despair.com naming scheme for our test servers:
failure ...
crash
burnout
apathy
mistake
stupidity
I thought the test reports were entertaining. Management not so much.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
It starts of innocently enough, breakfast, assam, green but it rapidly goes downhill when you get to things like lapsang-souchong and they wouldn't let me use Mister either.
MD: Why is the mail still not working!
Me: Because I can't remember how to spell souchong!
It doesn't fly, trust me ;^)
Regards, Phil
I had a boss who named servers after seemingly random geography: Akansas, Merced, Trinity...
Thanks to google, we were able to figure out what he did before he was in charge of a lab, though he was a bit disappointed it was that easy for us to figure out. Visitors to the lab were always a bit confused as to our naming scheme until we started adding names like Hudson and Colorado.
Not just my servers, but all of my hardware is named after Futrama characters. Hermes Conrad, a 320GB storage server, was recently replaced by Dwight Conrad, a new 1TB unit. My Palm is named Cubert Farnsworth, my main system Philip J. Fry (with the boot volume named Bender). And my Mighty Mouse's Bluetooth profile is named Nibbler. My old flash drive is named Morbo, with the new one named Calculon... my Wii is named Lrrr... honestly, it's gone a bit far. I'm going to have to recycle characters within a few years.
My favorite naming scheme was when I worked at Fujitsu Network Communications. The IT Admins used disease names for Windows 2000 Servers. e.g. CANCER PLAGUE MALARIA EBOLA etc.. I was surprised they could get away with it, but they did (It was a development environment though) Cheers, ahb.
Most of mine get named after characters from Dune: muaddib, irulan, stilgar, fenring, hawat, bijaz, etc.
Sometimes I'll borrow from other sci-fi: sisko, dejah, sheridan, jubal, etc.
$ uname -n
lappy
Sorry, I'm not creative at all.
Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Bird. When a user notices the names, it's a great conversation starter - and takes their mind off the annoyance for what would otherwise be an awkward minute of angrily "watching the progress bar."
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
then the security of my network would be blown wide open.
I've seen a couple setups at companies I've worked for, a QA company named all of the servers after the counties in the local area, and a lumber company used the names of Roman Gods.
Though one of the more interesting setups I've seen was in the computer department at my college. They had a theme for each room, and all of the computers in that room followed the theme. One room was the Simpsons with computers named Bart, Lisa, Quimby, etc. They also had Transformers, Dilbert, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings, and other good themes. The plus to this was a computer name alone was usually enough to tell at the very least what room the computer was located in.
My MythTV backend machine is named jeeves, so if there are any problems, I just blame the butler.
Chris Southern
My laptop: Fry
Wife's: Leela
Wife's old laptop: Amy
Printer: Zoidberg (dispenses ink)
Router: Bender ("bends" packets)
OLPC XO Laptop: Kiff (both small and green)
Car: Planet Express Ship (with which the 2006 Honda Civic shares a striking resemblance)
Cat: Zapp (cavalier, not too bright, doesn't wear pants).
I've been told by wifie that future pet names will include "Nibbler" and "Scruffy".
I always prefered useful names. Everyone was installing printers via IP address or Netware dotted nomenclature, but I'd go into the http config and add the location or name of a nice girl that sits near the printer :)
It helped, no really
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Hey, I'm glad you asked.
For over a decade now I named all my machines by cheesy european dance-muzak combos:
pharao, dune, 24seven (server), das-modul (laptop), aqua (macos), 2unlimited (nas)...
Anybody use Lojban? All 5 letters with known patterns. Minji (machine), Mlatu (cat), Gerku (dog) would all be nice.
My PCs are all named after Studio Ghibli heroines. I first used this with San (retroactively naming her predecessors Ichi and Ni), then with Chihiro and now with Shizuku. Both of the last two are still operating, and will be replaced with Haru and Taeko respectively. This doesn't factor much into operations, though the command line does display "rhapsody@shizuku" on this PC.
My home file server is called "server". My web servers are numbered using the last digit of their IP address (s0, s1, s2, etc).
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Mine are named after discworld characters:
:D
Main desktop - vetinari
Laptop - vimes
Shell account/web/mail server - lipwig (of course)
eeePC - rincewind (lots of travelling, see)?
It's even better if the character and computer role match up
95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)
I'm gonna start using diseases. Nothing like connecting to "Syphilis" to get ftp. And nobody is going to try and crack into a server named "Herpes".
Has enough for a good size network, and there is enough other information available and known. For example you can make a range of computers and the services based on element type, class, etc. Make the noble gasses firewalls, and the metals servers for example.
I don't think I agree. The vast majority of hostnames out there are pretty uncreative based on what I've seen. For example, 99% of the sites I visit have a hostname of simply "www".
At a place I was unix sys admin at about 10 years ago, I got the chance to build the infrastructure virtually from the ground up.
Being a metal head bassist, as well as a geek, I named the 1st new server I brought online, the firewall, moshpit (a p100 with 32MB of ram running Debian. Mind you this was a $100M/yr company!).
We then named all the other servers we brought online after things that can result from a moshpit: whiplash, hemorrhage, seizure, laceration, spasm, atrophy(after a really bad day in the moshpit!), etc..
Completely true. My computer is named Crow, my external is Tom Servo, my USB drive Mike, and my 2 gig SD card is Pearl. All named after MST3K characters for those who dont know.
When people call me for help, I want to hear clear and recognizable names, whether it's "Bert" and "Ernie" or "Portland" and "Chicago."
What really increases my alcohol consumption is when I see networks with five thousand devices all named on a variation of "djfh4538kj01", followed by communication difficulties. Congratulations, now your oh-so-clever naming schmeme means that we're going to spend the rest of the conversation talking about your boxes with the Nato phonetic alphabet.
"I'm sorry, are you seeing the route flap on Delta Juliet Foxtrot Hotel or Bravo Juliet Sierra Hotel?"
Do that a few times and you'll long for a cluster of boxes named Mal, River and Simon...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
So it may not be the most intuitive thing, but I name my computers after Magic cards:
[rabid] wombat: workstation
sustainer of the realm: router ('sotr' for short)
thalid: old workstation
dreamcache: fileserver
glory: server
stormscape [familiar]: laptop
I like to attach the actual cards to the machines after I name them. It's fun.
My roommate uses names from The Silmarillion.
"Intelligence has nothing to do with politics!"
-Londo Mollari
I name all my boxes in the style of aliases from the movie 'Hackers':
a random, 'cool-sounding' two-word combination -
I've got BubbleFloat, DreamReaver, BlackHawk (i was lazy that day), and more that i forgot.
Just name them all localhost.
I remember a place where I worked once got 7 new Sun servers.
There was a competition to see who could come up with suggestions for good host names. The winning suggestion was to name them after the 7 dwarfs.
The next day I logged in and saw IT had added the 7 new servers to the network.
They had named them dwarf1, dwarf2, dwarf3...
My school's terminal machines are simply numbered, generally, but the different servers are named after Greek gods - Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Hestia, etc. A friend of mine has all his machines named for Norse gods - Heimdall, Loki, Odin... I don't have a system, and I haven't decided on names for most of my gear - my backup machine goes by "Dodecapede", the Inspiron 9400 is the "USS Round Rock", but I'm sorry to say that there's not much else of interest. Even the main machine just goes by "the monolith" since I moved it into an Antec 1200 chassis.
The names of my boxen are:
zoidberg
nibbler
zap
Our old, now-closed Bay Area office had a lot of guys who were into SCUBA diving. The server naming scheme they implemented was "aquatic creature names."
My response: naming servers after fauna from the precambrian explosion, e.g.,
wiwaxia
anomalocaris
pikaia
opabinia
I have illustrations of these in my cube, for co-workers who wonder what the hell is going on.
No points for originality but 34sp name their servers after robots (etc) from the screen: Holly, Queeg, Mother, Orac, Marvin, Joshua, Kitt, Gort, Bishop, Earth, Carr, Pris, Deepthought, Colossus & Twiki.
As far as i know they don't have one called Proteus - and you can hardly blame them for that - he was a nasty bit of work. Then again i don't remember Colossus as much fun either - at one stage in the filim he has a bunch of people executed ffs!!! Not the fondest memory of my childhood watching that on tv :0
For smaller setups with less than ten machines, I like to use colours.
Red - Production Server
Orange - Staging Server
Yellow - Test Server
Green - Dev Server
Blue/Purple/etc etc for other things like the database server etc.
This way, when I'm setting up PuTTY or another shell, I can set the foreground text colour for each machine to match the server name, which stops most of those embarrassing mistakes when you run a command on production that you meant to run on test, and so on.
Is called "Torrentbox" (On account of terrestrial rain periods).
I record my sleeptalking
I worked in a corporate enviromnent and the only way we could get a purchase order approved by the Veeps was to explain our variety of servers as the ingredients of a salad. LETTUCE was the main webserver (the "money" machine) and the other servers were named for other ingredients from the garden. ONION for database (layers of relational data) and RADISH for email (more than a sprinkle is an irritant) and SCALLION of logging (nobody ever remembers, but so much flavor)
We named workstations after fruits -- because we were an Macintosh department. Nobody got a workstation named APPLE, but I did get the laptop named TOMATO, because I worked on the vegetables as the sysadmin. Tomatos are fruits which are legally considered to be vegetables.
Good times, very good times.
#30 TLS
after all the girls I've slept with.
I have a small network of 3 Windows boxes and 2 linux boxes. Most are named after what they are used for (Mom, laptop, etc.) but my own gaming PC is named something quite unprintable. It runs windows after all :)
I tend to stick with characters from Hamlet. It makes your servers sound epic.
lying-naked-in-the-periwinkle
anxiety-closet
mary-kay-commandos
old-steve-dallas
senator-bedfellow
Just add .mit.edu
> The MySQL error was: User itworld already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections.
> Currently, the username is itworld and the database server is 10.10.10.93.
Thank you for sharing your database details with us. Have a nice day. Plonk.
There are a number of schemes I ended up using in naming systems at my workplace. There really wasn't a rhyme nor a reason to how I named our machines, I just went with what sounded cool, but it also seemed that I had a tendency of having at least 2 system names related.
For example, Excalibur and Dragoon. Genesis and Revelation. Those I guess were the only two system pair that were somewhat related. One system was named Severn simply because I recall a Redhat distro being named Severn and thought it sounded cool. Another, now dead, system was named Velocity because not only did it sound neat, it was also a reflection of the type of acoustic work it was designed to perform.
Excalibur I think was the only system that I had reason to call it that. Being one of the coolest and most sought after swords of legend, it only seemed fitting to call the most powerful workstation in the office that (which at the time was dual Opteron 250's). The next step when I ended up getting my PowerMac Quad G5 was simply to call it Titan. That name ended up succeeding into one of our product names for my HPC startup company.
Announcement everyone! Hostnames are now limited to Unix.
What a bunch of elitist bitches.
the first group of linux machines were named after the Little Rascals, Darla, Spanky, Buckwheat, etc. Then we had a whole collection of VMS machines named after superheros and tropical fish, there was Ren and Stimpy - finally a VP had enough and all the machines were reduced to alphanumerics - ahh the good old days....
Our linux based astrophysics lab stations (primarily used for x-ray and radio astronomy) are all named after constellations: Perseus, Virgo, Pupis, Cassiopeia, etc.
I name my machines after fictional bad guys.
Melkor (a bit of a double-entendre, as my street address is similar)
Sauron
Vader
Vorpal (after the bunny)
Freddy
Morningstar (Lucifer being too obvious)
Ringwraith
Fenris (at a place where other machines were named after Norse mythological figures.)
The oddball is a laptop which I named d-minor. I'd originally intended to call it 'sauron' and decommission the older machine by that name, but I never did. D-minor is named after the common horror theme music.
One thing to be sure of -- if you're a geek, don't choose a naming scheme that's too limited, or you'll run out sooner than you think.
I don't have any particular naming scheme, I just use this page http://www.seventhsanctum.com/gens/adnamegen.php and refresh a few times till something cool sounding comes up.
I like both functional names (sf-qa-db01) and whimsical names (bart, lisa, homer, ...), so long as every hostname is easy to spell when hearing it over the phone.
When I call IT to report a problem, I don't want anyone to have to try to spell Chincoteague.
Most of our desktops in my lab are named after local cities and towns, except for one which is named "<job designation of user1", and our servers, which I am not kidding are named:
< acronym-of-lab >
< acronym-of-lab >1
< acronym-of-lab >-1
Yeah, not only do the servers have names that differ from by a single character, but the names suffer from verbal name collisions, leading to comments like: "Did you mean 'one' or 'dash one'?"
Someone really ought to take away naming rights from my advisor. Worst Naming Scheme Ever.
I sometimes wonder about that sysadmin... Good names: Rock, Liberace, Freddy, Magic. Most people didn't even realise there was a naming scheme.
planets and systems from the star wars universe.
That's my scheme.
They're using their grammar skills there.
> It's a really bad sign when your naming scheme is less user-friendly than IP addresses
I have three computers at home: gypsy, tomservo, and crow. My AP is named rocketno9. :)
Use google sets to general classes of names: example
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Cartman was for development because it was imature
And Kenny was the live machine because you couldn't kill kenny.
Two hard drives at work are named Itchy and Scratchy. Scratchy backs-up Itchy nightly. At home I have Thor for my media drive for movies and such, and Thor's Hammer for Time Machine Back-ups.
But you were allowed to deduce a family of names by examining the name of a single extant machine.
So if there was a machine called "bush", for example, possible names for your machine would include hedge, nixon, aubrey, etc.
Squirrel!
We used to have a bunch of SGI machines named after weather phenomena, where the name gave you a rough idea of the machine's power, like "hurricane", "thunder", "drizzle", etc.
I was the intern, and had to use a machine called "puddle".
Name them whatever you want on the inside, then use an alias for stuff on the outside. But don't tie geography to the hosts. You'll always have to rename them if they move, even aliased. If you don't it's asking for trouble. You really don't want to have to bring up new hosts in that old data center you moved from a couple years ago, do you? That's just a great way to confuse things: "Which MSFT-MGJ-MAIL01 box is the one that's really in SNA again?"
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Why Do We Name Servers the Way We Do?
Because we're nerds
...was named "Debbie"
This reminds me when a friend and I were playing with some reverse DNS tools and we looked up the IP on nsa.gov, then reversed that to gary7.nsa.gov. I've always named my workgroups Gary7 since then.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
When I had one PC, I just used my nickname on it. After I had multiple I started using a very simple naming scheme. The prefix Ran, and any subsequent ones get numbers. Along with a title if I feel sufficiently motivated.
So I have RanPC 2 - Revenge of the PC, RanMac 2 - The Quickening (Macbook Pro, been a little less reliable than I would like), RanPod 2 - The Listening, RanShuffle, RanCar, RanPhone, Ran360, RanDS...
It's a very flexible naming system.
No argument, just differing (from another dimension?) logic.
Say you are naming machines for an office, where Betty Sue may need to know (vaguely) what box does what. Give them all functional names. 'ColorPrinterWest', 'FileServerDallas'
Say you are naming machines for one project, for one customer, for half a rack's worth of machines, in one datacenter out of 5. Give them a damned coded name, so people know WTF they are, and WTF they do. Take a look at the names of some non-computer, IP-connected devices, like a switch. What would you name a switch? Maybe it's location, circuit, and basic type is the most functional name?
Look at server naming from that angle - it's not always about simplifying to that level, but rather encoding as much useful information as possible into sixteen characters.
...the greatest musicians on earth: Kage and Jables.
I take Bender's approach: "From now on, you're all called Bender Jr."
I go for the names of friends' pets. I'm currently typing on Halifax, ssh'd into Spoodge, Sooty is my laptop, and I have a Spenny, Nevyn, Tinyboy and Scully sitting around not doing anything.
This site has an extensive selection of naming schemes and is really helpful albeit being slow. A friend entered all the worlds nuclear power plants a couple of years ago.
Have fun
http://namingschemes.com/
If it was hard to write it should be hard to read.
My MacBook Pro triple boots OS X, Windows and Archlinux and they're named Val, Peter and Ender respectively to represent the different facets of the same computer. My gaming PC is named SHODAN and my server is named CryptNet. My Windows 7 Beta partition is, of course, Hitler.
Used to work for a small company where we named the servers after Futurama characters, Bender, Farnsworth, Calculon, Zoidberg etc.
I once worked for a large Fortune 500 company, in a division whose clueless manager dictated that all servers and workstations had to have a "standard" naming scheme of the form "xx###", where "xx" was two letters representing the department, and "###" were three randomly assigned numbers. Of course it was impossible to remember the names of the servers in our own department, and I had to maintain a functional listings to reference every time I needed to work on one.
However, I had no problem remembering the names of the NIS servers in a nearby department run by a different manager: Barbie and Ken, (of course Barbie was the master, and Ken was the slave). I remember this from 10 years ago, but I can't even remember the two-letter prefix from my own department.
Back in the day (before i switched my real life TLD), I had my local machines named after HHGTTG-characters, and I actually made some sense out of it.
:p
Marvin: Constantly complaining about menial tasks. Easy choice for a router.
Zaphod: Main server, being the only dual-cpu machine at the time.
Arthur: Win2k-server, just feeling out-of-place and generally lost.
Random: A really tiny mailserver
Trillian: Current GF's machine
Ford: Ehm.. my.. workstation.. whatever.
Nowadays, I'm left with "router", "$name-mac", "KeXpod" and "ford". Naming schemes are fun, when you have enough machines to make sense out of it
Before switching to HHGTTG, i had a brief period of naming the machines after DBZ-characters, but it quickly ended up making no sense at all (which damn machine is Piccolo anyway?).
I haven't seen anyone else post about using mythological names/creatures.
since I'm partial to Norse mythology, I tend to use gods and characters from there. When I run out (or there's not a good fit) I use Greek.
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
I personally think it helps to have machines named something somewhat sensical. At one place I worked, the firewall was a machine named Cerberus. Although, as someone else mentioned, machines have a tendency to get repurposed without ever having their names changed.
This guy's the limit!
We use the highest mountain peeks from our state. Baxter is the SQL server and Chimney is the Exchange server. We have considered moving to functional names but I am not sure it makes any more sense. The good news is with virtualization there is a lot less worry over functional names. We can always just provision a new server and take the old one down.
At a university I worked at in the late 80s, the vaxen were named Bilbo, Frodo, and Gandalf.
ThreeMile, Valdez, Congress, HyattKC, PruitIgoe (ok, a little local, look it up). Damn, there were more, but I can't remember them anymore.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Thrilldo
Drilldo
Wind-Milldo
Steel-Brilldo
and
Chalupa
I also named a simple SMTP server for a local public high school snatchbox.
I have the three Stooges (well.. actually 4)... Larry, Moe, Curly, and Shemp.
In Halifax some years ago a larger University took over a smaller but much better Engineering school called TUNS. The takeover was quite hostile with Dalhousie doing a "My way or the Highway" routine in all areas. The computer system set up by Dalhousie for TUNS was called borg. Never has a better name been given to a server.
Simpsons names are endless, and characters' personalities relate to servers' functions. Bart and Homer handle media and kidstuff, while Lisa, Mrs Krabappel and Principal Skinner deal with important stuff. Oh, and their respective backups- Marge, Groundskeeper Willy and Superintendent Chalmers.
It's too easy.
I functionally name my servers (DC1 is Domain Controller #1...etc) I know, it's not terribly creative.
We have a front-end, back-end topology for our exchange servers. A while ago, some users wanted to directly connect to the server containing the mail database and asked me what the name of the server was.
After I responded "backend" I had a bunch of adults in a room giggling like teenagers.
-ted
I got a new DB server. I wanted the Dr. Who reference, the Sysadmin wanted something different. We compromised with both.
I'm not a network guy at work, but I do have over 20 devices defined with static DHCP assignments on my home network. A few of the names are:
There's more, but I'm tired of looking at the DD-WRT DHCP page.
I'm open to suggestions for a comprehensive naming strategy. I'm sure someone around here could come up with something better. :)
Since my computers and peripherals are a matter of life and death, that's the theme I've used.
DIE - in an ironic sense, hoping my desktop wouldn't
LIVE - my dad's old computer, also in an ironic sense, hoping it wouldn't
LIMBO - mom's laptop, because who knows the path it will take.
Salvation - because macs are just oh so much better than PCs
Charon - Because my dSRL is tall dark and bad-ass
St. Peter - as a smaller camera, he's easier to introduce at parties than Charon.
Zombi - Even if my computers all die, my external hdd will survive.
Back in a place I worked we used to name machines after people who got sacked. Beat that.
To be fair, we were asked by management to change it after a while.
Last places I've worked used functional, descriptive and expandable naming schemes, that, while lacking the tongue-in-cheek humor, tend to lend themselves much nicer to quickly getting-in-context with a machine, expecially when you're managing a shop with machines (including VMs) ranging in the hundreds and thousands.
And being the geek that I am, functionality beats presentation/aesthetics. Well, most of the time anyway :)
-
I named all of mine George
Make America grate again!
It's not really fair to call this a dupe. This submission links to an article that provides commentary on the phenomenon of server naming, and the previous /. submission was cited as a particular example in that article. The article and previous submission are not of the same type. It is like saying that a documentary on the phenomenon of the Super Bowl is one and the same as a particular instance of a Super Bowl. You are making a category mistake by doing so. E.g., when I say "The phenomenon of the Super Bowl is generally exciting" and "Super Bowl XLIII was exciting", I am clearly not saying the same thing in both instances. Likewise, an article that says, basically, "The phenomenon of server naming conventions is generally very interesting" and another article that says "What is your particular server naming convention?" are clearly not saying the same thing.
This submission is, in my mind, beyond a shadow of a doubt, not a dupe of the previous submission that you linked.
The first computer that I named, I named "quiche", based on the old saying "Real Programmers don't eat quiche." After that, I developed the naming scheme of "foods that begin with the letter 'Q'". This may seem rather limiting, but you'd be surprised at how many names there are:
quiche, quail, quesadilla, quince, quahog (I have a list of a several more, somewhere...)
I eventually decided to relax my naming scheme slightly, and added some other "food related" words:
quaff, quinine
For devices, I decided to go with more descriptive names:
My printer is "quill".
My firewall is "quisling" (Quisling was a person in WWII who pretended to be on one side, but was controlled by the other).
My cell phone is "quetzel" (quetzel is a bird with colorful plumage -- I first got my cell phone just for show).
For a different set of machines, I decided to go with names of vehicles from Halo: ghost, scorpion, warthog, banshee
My favorite naming scheme from a lab back in college was names of Muppets.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
We started with The Muppet Show thinking that we'd eventually move on to The Dark Crystal, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock and so on. Wrong. There are an insane number of characters on The Muppet Show. Now, it's more of "how obscure can you get?" (e.g., the entire membership of Electric Mayhem) In general, we try to match the persona to the role of the machine. misspiggy = gigantic SAN volume, scooter = email, bobo = anti-spam, and so on.
Mine are named after Trek characters - the domain is Enterpise, this machine is Locutus, the old laptop is Picard, the new laptop is LaForge, the media centre is SevenOfNine, the office machine is Spock and the old computer on the other desk is Scotty. At various points there's also been a file server called Data and this machines predecessor was Captain-Kirk.
The best network I've seen had this naming scheme:
Network name: ENTERPRISE
Main server: KIRK
Web Server: CHEKOV
Mail server: UHURA
DB server: SCOTTY
Firewall: SULU
Test server: MCCOY
(and so on...)
(Chuckle)
This reminds me of the old OLD days of clandestinely naming the mainframe MYDICK and coming up with colorful metaphors and humorous imaginary service calls to an XX chromosome type...
(Sigh...)
At work I name them S1, S2, S3, etc... But I only have a like a dozen, so it's easy to remember and it makes life surprisingly easy, especially in scripts. I remember colleagues at another company wanting to use Baskin Robbins flavors because we had 31 servers. At home I use the moons of Saturn, which can be very descriptive; Atlas, AtlasI, AtlasII, Hyperion, Prometheus, Titan, Calypso, etc... I once a Director who wanted to use Massachusetts lighthouses. Can you imagine your servers named Annisquam, Straitsmouth, Gloucester, Monomoy, Tarpaulin, and Billingsgate?
My workgroup is called VIENNA2
...I may or may not have a degree in music composition...
My desktop machine is called Schoenberg64 (formerly plain "Schoenberg" before the upgrade to a 64bit OS), my laptop is called Webern, and my spare desktop (currently in use by my sister) is Berg
This was all before I got my XBox 360, which for some reason decided to stop streaming from Schoenberg64, so I renamed it Shithead64, and it magically worked!
The naming convention at one of my previous jobs was movie directors, the "client" for the server could choose their favourite director as the server name. The problem? In one case the client's favourite director was Roman Polanski. In these pre-Wikipedia days it was much harder to check names for possible controversies, and the server was duly named. It was only some time after that it was realised that Mr Polanski's alleged sexual activities made it.. difficult.
These days I work in an organisation with thousands of machines and hundreds of servers. We use a boring format of two-digit-ISO-code + machine-type + number + role, so LVS006ISA is a Latvian ISA server. We also use "D"esktop and "L"aptop designators (e.g. NLD0123). It's a helluva lot easier. And much more difficult to name a server after an alleged kiddyfiddler.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
When I started where I work, all the QA systems were reliably named after various cartoon characters - Underdog, Velma, and many others.
That seems to have degraded. First there were other fictional characters (like Aragorn) and now there are systems named after employee pets among other things.
At an earlier job, they were a small-time hardware manufacturer as well as being a software development company, so servers tended to be named the model of hardware they were (like r400 or whatever.) We finally persuaded them that pronounceable names were good, and started working through the phonetic alphabet (since we did some work for Delta Airlines.)
That fell apart too - we skipped Alfa because it was spelled funny, had a Bravo, and the company went out of business before there was a Charlie.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Mythological creatures: Gargoyle, Kelpie, Wendigo, Tengu, Baast, Chimera
at work, its location, application/purpose, dev/prod/tst, DB/Web, and if there are any redundancies 1,2,3,4...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I seem to have bad luck with the one I named Alderaan, though. It seems to either disappear or blow up randomly when I plug my laptop (deathstar) on to the network. I don't get it either.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
http://qdb.us/294682
<sniep> my servers are all named after computer parts so that users sound like retards asking for anything
<sniep> "i need full access to ram!"
<sniep> "why is megabytes broken?!?"
<sniep> "who rebooted hard drive??!??"
I name my laptop Sasha, my gaming desktop is Raila, and my old desktop Bob.
I don't like Bob.
why ... because i can...
My main pc is always Vectorsigma however http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Sigma
of course, which had the answer to the life, the universe, and everything. And when he got old the RFP for a new one was called 'The Quest for the Son of Deep Thought,' made famous in some esoteric circles. Our Novell server way back then was 'Moby Fred,' since Moby Dick was on another line (originally the secretary's big white SUV.)
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Back when Demon Internet had two Center Of World servers (COWs) they called one ermin-servers.router.demon.net and the other trude-servers.router.demon.net. See this old usenet posting from way back in 1996.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
a decade ago we had a SGI Onyx2, it was six foot tall and purple, so everyone started calling it Barney when it got un-crated and it stuck. For years we had Rocky, Bullwinkle and Barney.
I know an ISP who was caught up in Operation Sundevil who named his servers after the agents who busted him, e.g. golden, foley.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
So, I started out with waste, fraud and abuse. When I needed more names I added bend, fold, spindle and mutilate. fraud is how I got my user name since I'm dave@fraud.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Currently my home machine is Ghostwheel. Previous machines have been named Morpheus (from the Matrix, not mythology), Kermit (it was green), Batman (and Robin), and HAL 9000.
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
They use two or three randomly generated words put together. My computers over there were:
Windows: letfancypick
MacBook: coloronly
RHEL: studenthuman
(Yes, they gave me three computers.)
I name the machines in my LAN after precious stones - actually, they started as Sailor Moon / Black Moon Clan villains (I'm not joking), but I started liking the precious stones names better. The desktop is always named diamond, whatever machine it is. Nowadays, my laptop is named aquamarine, and the secondary laptop is named sapphire. The old desktops that become servers upon reincarnation start going down in value: ruby, emerald and so on.
http://www.namingschemes.com
Just like my user name, I decided to go with the word "snow" in various languages. So far, I have my router chioni, server nix, desktop losse, and various other names for components. My wii is yuki, my xbox 360 is xue, my ipod touch is lumi. Beyond that I've also used "eira" and "schnee".
So... do you actually have something named "snow"?
It may be cliche but....
I once was the sole IT person of a small business.
I built a new server and couldn't decide what to name it. It was the first server I had built myself. I decided to name it Mimir, a viking god.
I later found out he is also the god of Information Technology.
It was a stable server and I now believe that IT requires a little irrational deification.
Our 10 meter telescope was a joint German/American collaboration, so the Germans who assembled the control system used German beer names. Was that Heffelweitzen or Heffelweisen? The 12 meter telescope's control system was rebuilt by Americans, so the computers are named Modelo and Corona etc. since we're in Arizona.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
I name all my machines after wild members of Compositae (or Asteraceae) - thus: sunflower, dandelion, chamomile and thistle.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Computer11, Computer12, etc. Get a new printer? Computer13, etc. New server? Computer14, etc. New user? Computer15, etc. Passwords? Computer16, etc.
It can be go tiem now plees?
Sesame Street character names. At least a dozen characters. We almost used Snuffleupagus.
Grog Me!
The only name for a DHCP server is IPFreely.
Reprise the theme song and roll the credits!
My first computer I called manic, since then I have been using synonyms. Antsy, agitated, skittish, fidgity(laptop), inflamed(firewall), unstrung, daft...
All of the machines at a hardware manufacturer I worked at named them for beers. Any kind of beer.
It was kind of fun finding names for new ones.
Corona (fileserver) had an uptime of over 2 years before we upgraded the hard drive, thereby requiring a reboot......
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
desktop - fatman
test machine - trinity
laptop - littleboy
router - enolagay
In my undergraduate years, I used to be the admin for a linux/windows net in my dorm.
The network itself was called Cocaine, an acronym for COllegio CArducci Internal NEtwork (Collegio means dorm in italian). The main server was named LSD (Linux Server & Domain-controller), the aux server ACID (Auxiliary Computer for Intranet Daemons).
Our clients were named unsurprisingly: mescaline absinthe amphetamine ketamine hashish prozac ice alcohol heroin.
People have lots of computers with different names at home. Here are mine: "Desktop", "Laptop", "Netbook" and "Tablet".
qa1
qa6
qa27
qa51
qa174
qa175
Yes, those are real machine names for machines I'm working on right now...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
We name ours after Harleys.
Springer, Deuce, Wideglide, Ultraglide, Fatboy, Rocker, etc.
There's an entire Wiki here with lists:
http://namingschemes.com/
"I like to skate on the other side of the ice"
I like to name my boxen after different STDs. herpes, syphilis, warts etc. The opportunity for puns is endless.
doesn't this belong in Idle? On the grounds that it's a dupe that wasn't funny in the first place
Being a fan of The Matrix, I was excited at my employer's use of Matrix character names to name their servers.
In practice, having our appserver installed on a box named Oracle, our database on Switch, and development server on Cypher was pretty damned confusing.
Psoriasis, Herpes, Halitosis, TineaPedis, Acne, etc.
I have servers named after Greek gods:
- zeus is the production server
- apollo is FTP/file storage
- athena is databases, etc
- hermes is backup
rock bands with single-word noun names: nirvana, wheatus (well ...), eels, shins, jawbreaker ....
I don't run a network, but when setting up the home router, I decide to give the wireless portion the following SSID: "Inventive_Network_Name".
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
When I was at Georgia Tech, we named our network down at the Woodbury radio astronomy facility after famous astronomers throughout history.
Later, when I got my job after grad school, we named a network at my R&D lab after historical painters.
My machines at home are named after historical cyclists.
In a previous job I submitted several naming schemes for approval; the first one that was approved was to name servers after the planets. It went fine until we got to Uranus, and the snickering began.
In another instance, we had three mainframes to name. For some reason they didn't go with my proposal to name them Yahweh (the Father), Jesus (the Son), and Casper (the Friendly Ghost).
I had more success at a later job, where I had dozens of servers, printers, etc. to name and proposed using names from Greek mythology. I carefully reserved the more difficult to pronounce names for machines that didn't face the users (e.g. Aeolus). Officially, the assignment of specific names to certain printers, servers, etc. had no significance (to protect me in case someone inferred a meaning I didn't intend), but I often had a private association in mind that helped me keep track of which name applied to which device (e.g. Iris was the main color printer, a system in the metalworking lab was Hephaestus)
On my home network, each machine is named after a member of the Justice League: Clark, Bruce, Diana, Barry, Hal, Ollie, Dinah...
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
caprica(web-ecommerce); kobol(fileserver); adama(admin); gaeta(database); starbuck(prototyping)
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
My wireless access point is called Marconi. My old printer was Caxton. The new printer is Gutenberg.
Server and two desktop machines are Tom, Dick and Harry.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
The two most common naming conventions are:
* As used by *nix admin/engineers - Muppets or Sesame St characters ...I hate it when I come across mail servers called 'Grover'. Grrrrnnnngggggg!!!!
* As used by Windows admin/engineers - Location-function-number
There are enough of them to name things, and... they all sound cool and sciency :-)
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
All my machines are Turing award winners. I'm typing this on Backus.
dexedrine: a dual PIII, which isn't exactly speedy.
mescaline,lysergide & lidocaine are others that sprung to mind.
Mirus Koobox: Mironic IBM ThinkPad: Theos Acer Aspire: Spiralia Gateway 2000: MaxGate Memorex Telex: Telly the Memory Monster and my favorite Dell OptiPlex: Optical Rage
Ken, Dennis, Brian, Alan, Joy, Grace ...
(First and last names represented)
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Having worked in two large operations now, for the love of all things pasta, use functional names.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
My main workstation is Odin. My 2 other servers are named Hugin and Munin. Can you guess why?
Another day closer to redwood heaven
I use formation names from the strat column of the East Texas Basin, Woodbine, Paluxy, Glenrose, Nacatoch etc. This machine, however, is Pickles, from the character in the Opus comic strip.
Hey, if we're listing... my family's home machines have been named after fictional computers or artificial intelligences:
hactar, neuromancer, wintermute, brainiac, Windows boxes included Deep Thought, The Earth, The Oracle, and The Architect, routers were ennesby and jane, NAS is max (Headroom, that is).
I had a series of external hard drives named Kingdom, Power, Glory, and Forever.
My university's CS department named the computers in the labs after cereals, pasta, and soups (which identified what room they were in). When I was working there I started setting up some Final Fantasy themed ones (gurgu, corneria) but didn't get very far.
I name all my computers after stuff from 2001 A Space Odyssey There's my games box called Bowman, file server called Clavius, laptop called Tycho, netbook called Discovery, best of all though my work box called Monolith, because it's built into a jet black Antec p182
RZA - backup server, razor sharp, always on point.
Inspektah Deck - mail server
Raekwon - Windows Server, bit torrent
Ghostface Killah - Ruby server
ODB went down a couple years ago and we haven't revived him...sadly.
Method Man - dunno what we have on him, but he's been up for a couple years.
U-God / Golden Arms - Smoothwall
DeepThought
Earth
Hactar
Eddie
Marvin
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-- Ernest Hemingway
Over the last five years, I've encountered a surprising variety of server naming schemes... a handful are extremely common (South Park, Simpsons, planets, cars) but there have been some very interesting themes:
- Mountains (Rushmore, Hood, K2, Adams, McKinley...)
- Presidents
- Muppets (Beaker, Dr Teeth, Statler and Waldorf [db cluster]...)
- Disasters (Tsumani, Andrew, Rita...)
- Zodiac
- Grateful Dead songs (Sugar Magnolia, Tennessee Jed, Ramblin Rose...)
- Local Breweries (Steelhead, Full Sail, Rogue...)
- ATF (AK-47, Moonshine, JimBeam...)
- Norse Pantheon (Odin, Thor, Loki...)
Sadly, clever themes are dying out as data centers scale up... the result is that the 'old-school' core systems maintain their personalities but new server/desktop builds have a derived hostname (userid, core function, platform, etc).
This really is an unfortunate loss, since (similar to conference room names) you can learn a lot about the company culture by the way they identify their resources.
An object at rest cannot be stopped!
We acquired aour first major UNIX computer around the time Mt Saint Helens blew up. So one had that name, and others were named after other volcanoes.
At work, I hit up rinkworks namegen , then do a google search on each term to make sure it's not a common (nor offensive) word in some other language, and that's the name of the actual machine. Machine then gets a logical DNS name based on function (e.g. the server hatrakos is there to run nagios, so there's a DNS alias "nagios" out there for it, as well as "hatrakos").
At home, someone was a fan of Chobits (manga) when the last round of laptops got purchased, so they're all variants on the name "Plum" (the name of a portable computer) ("Sumomo" (Japanese), "Ameixa" (Portugese)).
Before that, we wanted to defer naming a server at the house, so it's still called "later".
We use disney characters. Mickey, minnie, etc. After the PIXAR deal, we got a whole bunch of new characters. Sully, buzz, nemo, etc.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
I have the following on my home LAN (or soon to be, in any case):
Joplin (named after Scott Joplin) - a Debian lenny/testing laptop that I just rescued from being stuck in a closet for the better part of a year :)
Confrey (named after Zez Confrey, composer of Kitten on the Keys) - a HP desktop that currently runs the Windows 7 beta smoothly
Gottschalk (named after Louis Moreau Gottschalk) - the laptop I'm typing this on (running Vista SP2 beta)
At other times I've had Bolcom (for William Bolcom) and Lamb (for Joseph Lamb) on the network...
The only things right now that don't follow this convention are my home server and my work laptop (as well as my XBox360, but I don't think you can give it a name), but we'll see what we can change there. :D
I used to work at one company where the machines were all named after serial killers. I was *not* happy about that one. I think it said something about the IT manager there, who I definitely did not get along with.
I was working at my desk, and our wonderful DoItAll was building up a server for us on a table behind me. Once he got to the point that it needed a name, he asked out loud, to no one in particular:
"Ok. What do you guys want me to call this?"
Without looking up, I said:
"Fred"
That's the name of the server to this day. It's the backbone of our intranet. No one has asked me to name a server since.
http://downwithpants.org Overthrow the tyranny of your pants
Back when we had a bunch of big SGI graphics machines we decided that they were basically cold heartless bastards with no love of humankind - so we named them after mass-murderers: Hinkley, Lechter, Sutcliffe, etc. This was considered to many to be kinda tasteless - but hey - we're geeks.
When we started to transition over to using Linux PC's for doing our graphics, they seemed like little toys - so we had all sorts of toy names, stuff like Crayola, Etchasketch, etc - but as we learned to network a bunch of them to do the same work, they earned names like Lego, Duplo, Erectorset, etc.
When I named my machines at home, my son was going through a 'batman' phase - so we had Batcave, Waynemanor, Batmobile (a laptop), Alfred, etc. Later the craze was The Matrix - and we used the names of the hover-craft. The machine I'm using now is still called Gnosis for that reason.
www.sjbaker.org
For actual server names, we use 3 character prefixes to denote use (prd, dev, ttf for tech test facility, vrf for verfication, etc), then 2 chars for os type (lx for linux, ai for aix, ux for hp-ux and sx for solaris), then a 3 digit sequence that is unique across each use... prdux001, prdai007, etc.
rather uninteresting to be sure... but not something we had a choice in due to constraints by management
so... when we started to get partitionable 'frames', such as Power4/5/6 frames by IBM, or our Sun 12Ks, we started naming them after 'imaginary locations', such as Minis Tirith, Romulus, Vulcan, etc... usually centered on Star Trek, Star Wards, LoTR, etc...
Of course, one person named a frame Alpha Centauri, and had to be clued in that that wasn't an imaginary place....
so now the flood gates have opened and we have Gorgo and Arlen and Quahog, etc
My shiny new macbook is named Lust.
My torrent machine is named Greed.
My gaming rig is named Sloth.
All aptly named, I believe :) I lack other machines to complete my set!
Since the beginning of Suso in 1997, I've been using the first names of great composers and musicians.
Antonio, Franz, Gustav, Arvo, Camille, etc.
It has worked quite well as there are a lot of unique yet pronounceable names.
GI*Joe characters are great names for servers. One can even group machines: web servers have Cobra names, while database servers have GI*Joe names.
Sometimes the less known GI*Joe names are the best: Chuckles, Blowtorch, Torpedo, Tollbooth... Hours of fun!
lucm, indeed.
My machines are US aircraft carriers, starting with Langley (CV-1). I'm up to Wasp (CV-7) now. I've had two machines that were named Bismarck and Tirpitz after the German battleships, and I think my dad's machine is Prinz Eugen (German cruiser), and there's a Scharnhorst somewhere too (likewise).
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
My machines (three in all, one Ubuntu server, one Windows2003 server, and one XP/Vista/Ubuntu tripleboot are named mrbill, mrhands and sluggo... props to anybody who knows where those came from....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I name my computers, routers and the like after my favorite female anime characters. There is a certain elegance (imho) in having one part of a machine named after something cool and/or cute, and having all of them end in -chan. Fate-chan, Nanoha-chan, Hayate-chan, you see a pattern here? Why? Because I'm a fucking otaku when it comes to shit like this, and I KNOW I'm not the only one :D
My home network has a very simple naming system. Since I'm using the planets, its really easy to see what the 'purpose' of each machine is. Gas giants are servers, planets are desktops, moons are laptops, satelites are devices, and comets are various cruft. Oh, and subnetworks are galaxies :)
My main servers are Jupiter (huge compaq beast from '98), Neptune (a nice mythtv server), and Saturn (another mythtv server).
Laptops are Callisto, Charon, and Thebe.
My one desktop is Pluto.
Finally, my 'cruft' is my Wii SOHO, XBox Ares, HP scanner/printer Hubble, and my wireless subnet is called Andromeda. Its quite simple and makes sense to me.
had names based on a theme. The older style curvy gray cases were named after Transformers. The newer angular, boxy cases are named after Matrix characters.
Personally, because of the large case I used, my general use computer is Behemoth. My server was then dubbed Leviathan, my netbook is Ziz, and my media centre PC is Reem. Look on Wikipedia for the last two.
I helped run a lab for a journalism class on horrible ancient hardware. We named the stations after South Park characters with the machine notorious for failing named Kenny. This naming convention came about for no other reason than it allowed us to shout, "They killed Kenny. You bastards!" whenever something happened to that box.
hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.
Balthasar, Caspar, Melchior
Also the names of the supposed 3 wisemen/kings that visited the baby Jesus.
:wq
A few months ago, my dev team and I spent about 45 purple faced breathless minutes going over all the possibilities of naming our dev servers after our own asses...
It all started with, "What's wrong with fredsass? I can't get into it today, and I'm not sure if the logs filled it up, or it's just %#&@ed..."
I name all of my computers after Renaissance artists. My brother's XP computer is RAPHAEL, our XP desktop is MICHELANGELO, and my Ubuntu laptop is DAVINCI
Especially the more obscure ones (at least to you non-norse). Thus Njord, Frey, Hel, Loki (ok, not so obscure, but no resistable). Then there's the various kings and their wives from the sagas. And Ragnarok. (We save the fermented fish names for software - sustromming, etc.).
The article department is hilarious, because we did name some of our machines after Muppets at my old job. There were two monitoring machines, so of course we called them Statler and Waldorf.
types of snakes
types of cheeses
types of hats
types of wind
oddly named small towns in texas
Actually after reading the story I must con cure: We use a chemical name scheme based on a study by our head-sysadmin. But on top of that we use a (read CNAME) secondary name scheme based on functionality. E.g. ssh.domain.object. thus ssh being the means of access. This might include nxserver unless you have a windows server too. Then would introduce a new name (CNAME) called rds (remote desktop service) rds.domain.object. Idealy the port of entry should discriminate between services. Anyway, just my 2cents, A univ. sysadmin. ps. This is not the best way to deal with problems. It all depends on contexts!
Back in the early '90s, when I first switched to using a portable as my main computer (haven't owned a desktop since), I started using fictional robot names.
From oldest to newest:
Tom Servo
Croooow!
Timmy
--then we leave MST3k for--
Bender
Marvin the Paranoid Android
--and the one I'm typing this on--
Flexo
Lots of room of expansion, but I refuse to use HAL. What do you mean HAL's not a robot? Just because the body isn't humanoid?
I started at a new company and when I was setting up the first UNIX server someone yelled out that we were going out for Mexican food for lunch ... just as I booted the box for the first time - forever known as "Burrito" (an IBM F40).
Then came Enchilada (UltraSPARC), Jalapeño (HPUX), Guacamole (IBM P25), Mariachi (backup/Jukebox/mp3 server), Fajita (dual CPU SCSI workstation), Tequila (Dell 4 CPU server). I can't recall any others, but we were only 20 people doing development.
At the STL in NASA-JSC, they used superheros: batman, superman, batgirl, robin, marvin ... ... ...
and Disney characters: mickey, minimouse, goofy,
and stars: regulus, deneb, icarus, romulus, hadar, qbe,
The name of my firewall machine is ...
...
... asbestos
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I prefer names that mean something. A habit I acquired working on large, very large, distributed IT systems for $LARGEAZURECOMPANY. For example if you have a print serve in Chicago throwing errors it was nice to see: "chiprt7 not responding" as opposed to "Bilbo not responding".
The first message tells you Chicago print server #7 is having problems. The second one tells you nothing.
Or how about a name like dallsite2DB04? If an error is thrown, you know you are dealing with Dallas server, site number 2, database server #4.
Use cute names for your personal rigs. Use useful names for production systems.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
My last two major evolutions were mostly satisfying.
In the first, a multi-national pharamceutical development corp, I was supporting two major locations for one division. We had two major locations, and chose parallel naming systems of Greek and Roman gods, with the same (equivalent) servers in different locations being assigned equivalent names from differing mythologies.
In the second, a boutique law firm in a communications practice, we had only one location. I chose "the sites of the seven wonders of the ancient world" and (in sequence) we had giza, babylon, and ephesus, and occasionally olympia or even further.
As to why? I always perceived it as one of the few allowed areas of differentiation, like wearing a flashy tie that said something about you. Everyone outside the department, on the rare occasion that they had to deal with actual server names, was presented with a curious set.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
When my company was a subsidiary of the Time-Warner network, all our servers were named after Warner's cartoons. We had elmer, porky, tweety etc.
On my home network, I have penguins. It was touchy until penguins got popular after Madagascar came out. I have tux, opus, chilly and rico right now. My wife collects hippo figurines, so she's got gloria (also from madagascar).
Bitch - My desktop, because it does whatever I tell it.
Slut - My laptop because it goes anywhere and connects with anything
Whore - My webserver, because it gives out things to others.
It started when a friend of mine renamed my desktop to bitch and I extended the scheme.
There's lots of them. It also allows grouping by theme (moons of Jupiter, arctic islands, fictional ones, etc.). My home machines are all islands from Ursula K. LeGuin's "Earthsea" series.
Shrek(AIX)
Fiona(Linux)
Puss-n-boots(Linux)
Charming (Linux)
Automan (AIX)
Hole (5TB FastT 700)
Dosxx (Cisco 9216)
Corazon(Cisco 9500)
Tendon (Cisco 9500)
Sunfire (Sun Machine)
Tens(Linux) (Strip Club in Tucson AZ)
Flemball
Alexa
hilbert
nimble
and many others
as a rail buff, i named my boxes all after long island rail road towers.
I try to combine both functional and fun naming schemes. Ok, not super fun, but interesting. I try to name my computers after animals which (somewhat) connect in my mind to what they do.
Timberwolf - current desktop
Coyote - old desktop
Princess - wife's laptop
Bison - server
Sabretooth - Wii
Raptor - loaner desktop
Timberwolf was made using from the drives of Coyote, so it was an upgrade Coyote to Wolf. Bison is big (hard drive wise) and so is the real life bison. Sabretooth because those things are f'ing cool (as is the Wii) and Raptor because I tend to clone that a lot. And Princess, well, it should be obvious.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Would naming a server Skynet just be asking for trouble?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
That's why I named the only Windows PC on my network: "BillyGatesColon", and expect it to be 'probed'...thoroughly...and deeply...and repeatedly...*money shot!*
" 'help-desk-print-server' "
That one I just named 'Clippit'.(an interactive, animated 'spent' staple entity[1] is presented in the GUI when you connect to the server...it takes you where you want to go[2])
*Foghorn Leghorn voice: 'It's a joke, son...I made a funny!' *Foghorn Leghorn voice* [my apologies for a bad paraphrase!]
[1] 'spent'==think removing a staple from some pages with a staple remover tool...then animate the mangled remains==Zombie Spent Staple!...FTW!!1!
[2] Well, actually, it takes you to the nearest ATM so you can get money to pay for the psychotherapy needed to deal with this kind of crap, but...YMMV, some folks can't get enough of this abuse!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
riffington
aylee
zoe
gwynn
lysinda
lorna
Guess my naming scheme.
always said that if you give them star trek names they'll work faster and better..
We had a fun naming scheme, servers were 14k peaks, switches were mountain passes and Tape Silos were named after mines in the mountains (getting the theme?) well all was good until some smarty named a new library 'glory hole' and a new server Kenny (yes, there is a Mount Kenny, and yes, we killed Kenny a lot).
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
I named my first Linux box 'baga' because it made me smile at the bash prompt:
root@baga
A member of the turnip family...
And admin here proposed naming our lab computers with the following scheme:
lab[lab #][computer a-z]
So... that way the first one would be lab1a.
Have two names per machine, a name for the machine itself, and a name for the services the machine provides, CNAME one to the other.
Say that machine's a webserver. Name it nelson, cname webserver01 to it. Setup monitoring using the functional names (webserver01, ns1, etc.) and use the other names for everything else. As people have said elsewhere, machines get repurposed, they rarely get renamed.
I've found that abstract names work well in small companies, where servers tend to handle a lot of different roles and are often moved or re-purposed.
For larger companies where most machines are single tasked and configuration management is in place, it makes more sense to name based on the machine's role. For example: sf-corp-web-01 will be kickstarted and given a new name before it becomes a corporate quake... Uh... I mean mail, server.
This lets us fly our nerd flag high. This also insures we will never run out of names since they'll just make more. Also, when a machine "dies" it can always be resurrected!
All you need to do is have a new hire forget for a moment that "Dolphin" is your five-nines-must-be-up-at-all-costs production database and "Porpoise" is your office quake server to have a massive, highly costly, possibly fatal failure...
Ain't that the truth! Can you imagine, you're just about to enter Dimension of the Doomed and you wind up with a bunch of useless payroll and client information instead? Meanwhile, your player gets pwned by Abigail from Accounting....
My network may look a little messed up...
Xaotik Designs
file server - Dealer
database - booky
router - bouncer
etc.
should be easy enough to figure out
is good
if u r in the field
u already knew
I work at a company with 5000+ servers (actually, I work on the account that supports that company nowadays, but that's another story).
Anyone else have that many? What do you name them? I'm especially interested in people that think that functional names are not a good idea.
We name ours with a construct that combines { site, service, tier, environment, instance # }.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I think that when you name things, they gain a soul. and they behave differently than unnamed things... The anthropomorphization of objects isn't new, but I think it works in the sense of peace of mind.. your named object is your friend. Treat it well and it won't break when you need it most...
My old naming scheme was surnames of Simpsons characters.
Wiggum - server
Smithers - Windows box
Muntz - ex-wife's machine
Nahasapeemapetilon - Linux box (I changed it when I couldn't spell it when mapping a UNC path)
Flanders - other Windows box
Moleman - My Windows 98 pc I used for old DOS games
Now I've consolidated and gotten rid of most of my computers. New naming scheme. See if you can pick it:
Howard - Server
Vince - Gaming PC
Bollo - Laptop
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
... I've done this several times.
Weather names (tornado, hurricane, etc.)
The Rugrats (angelica, tommy, chuckie, etc.)
Doctor Who companions (zoe, romana, etc.)
I almost had one project up to sv7, but the bean counters only bought six servers.
My latest project had the workstations named after muscle cars of the '60s (Mustang, Camaro, Chevelle, etc) and the servers named after land-yachts (Fleetwood, Continental, etc).
Do you attach the name to the hardware, or the software?
I presume some people attach the name to the hardware, much like you'd name your car. In that case, it makes no sense to name the machine according to function, since that function will undoubtedly change over the lifetime of the machine.
Personally, I attach the name to the software, since I already use the serial number (or our own internal tracking number) to identify the hardware. Whenever I repurpose a machine, I always start over with a shiny new OS install, so the name can be changed easily. In this case, functional naming is probably more appropriate.
I'm too lazy to think of anything to put here.
Siemens Sietec used to use the table of elements: if a manger gives you a machine to install late on a Friday, you can then leave a voicemail for him that says "your new machine is disprosium, IP address 66".
After a few hundred tries, he'll remember how its spelled.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Our naming convention allows 3 chars for personalization. I went with doctor seuss names:
My development servers are GRN, EGS, HAM, SAM (I wanted IAM too but ran out of systems)
My product support servers are FOX, SOX, CLX, BLX
It makes it easy to remember which systems are mine, but it gets confusing when they're clustered together. "Now, was I working on CLX or BLX?")
You can't be a linguaphile unless you can spell it. Sorry.
being Salai, tho this was just the nickname he gave to him... http://www.lairweb.org.nz/leonardo/salai.html
I must be lame, all of my servers are named
LocOSDesc
So SBUBTPRINT
or DTDEBWWW
If there is more then one, we tack on a number.
We are really uncreative, but we know where all our shit is and what it does.
We had a sysadmin who had been to Germany and brought back a road atlas. Our boxen were named after German cities. It was good, except for the people whose computers went over the 15 character netbios character limit . . .
...just name them after the US presidents. Personally, I always reserve Taft for my single Windows box.
I started creatively naming my machines a while back since it makes remembering which ones which so much easier. There are still people though that think its confusing. I don't know. Its easier to remember the big ones Jupiter, the off site one is Pluto. A lot easier then Blade1, APP1. Unfortunately, I ran out of planets a while ago so I have been using moons.
I heard about some Solaris boxes (at UC Berkeley I think) with the names: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride.
These were called "The Seven Deadly Suns". <rimshot>
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
We reused an old piece of junk machine as a print server in our development lab, which was connected to the enterprise network. We gave it an appropriately descriptive name, Dungpile. Little did we know that in its prior life Dungpile had been configured as a DHCP server. (We didn't look at it too closely... our bad.) One day we hear a frazzled guy from the IT department going door to door crying, "I'm looking for Dungpile! Does anyone know where Dungpile is?" It turns out the enterprise DHCP server had a hiccup, and in the subsequent negotiation for which backup would take over, Dungpile won out. Our little print server started handing out 10.10.*.* IP addresses (it was evidently set up for a private network) to the enterprise workstations. That worked very poorly. The IT folks could tell the bogus addresses were coming from a machine called Dungpile, but didn't know where it was located. (I don't know why they didn't just boot Dungpile and force their primary server to resume duties. The weren't a great team.) Anyway, it made my day hearing someone wandering the hall yelling about finding dungpile.
My Web host's servers are all named after Star Wars characters.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Inca, Maya, Aztec, Mongol, Hun, Roman, Goth, Zulu...
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I name my computers after Physicists. My desktop is Maxwell, there's also a Planck and my server is Weber.
I intend to add another one soon, which physicist should I choose next?
At Portland State University, the servers are mostly named after segments of norse mythos, which makes sense, seeing as how the school mascot is the vikings. What I found really amusing is that for about 5 years or so, it looks like the sysadmin in charge of naming wasn't aware of the viking theme, so all the servers set up during that period are named after lord of the rings.
I name my PCs based on different naming schemes. So I have on my LAN an Athlon, Laptop, Debian, Thinkpad, another one with my ex gf's name, my first computer was named Microsoft and my retired server was ShadowCat. Weirdly enough it wasn't intentional, I just kept switching naming schemes always thinking "this one's gonna be the definitive one", 'til I thought of a better one ;)
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
The first servers I never used were novell 386 file servers in 1988 or so named fred and ethel. I very quickly learned that anything I have to type a million times better be easy to type, so all my machines are now named io and ip and et and vm and the like.
We've named our routers (and switches) missionary, doggy, reverse-cowboy, lotus, spoons, bukkake, and daisy-chain.
I used to admin a bunch of machines for a student hardware engineering lab. I called them "short", "smoke", "glitch", "race" and "hang".
My friend's old network had machines named after members of the band MetallicA. I currently name my devices after rocks & minerals. E.g. Argentum (silver laptop), Zircon-mineral used to date the oldest rocks (archive server) etc
My boss love star wars, he named the application/DNS server Coruscant, and the terminals with Star Wars Universe's planet (Bespin, Alderaan, Dantooine, Dagobah, Corellia, Kamino, etc).
Roland Eddie Jake Suzannah Mordred Flagg
mont-blanc, hindenburg, valdez, challenger, titanic, columbia, fanny-fern, sultana, r-101, saluda ...
What? Me? Worry?
Why? RFC 1178.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html
My home computers are named: Avalon, Stonehenge, and Fjords.
Work Servers:
Tiamat (secondary db)
HAL (Primary DB, incidentally named HAL on HAL's b-day Jan. 12)
Titan (web server)
Boomer (long story)
Waldo (gis server)
Wintermute (main dispatch server)
Watson (asterisk pbx)
Goober (gas pump reader)
Skynet (radio interface)
Other Work computers (desktops):
Abraxa, Osiris, Anjaneya, Anubis, Sehkmet (the rest of the pantheon has been retired)
Einstein, Bernoulli, Heisenberg, Hawking, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Tyson
Pendragon, Lancelot, Morgana, Mithras, Merlin
Marvin, Horus, Rochdale, Midas, Boudica, Kornfeld (accounting machine)
Gutenberg (printer/copier)
Needless to say we have a bit of a sense of humor when naming computers. I got to pick about half of those. I have to say it is one of the funner parts of my job.
I used to name my servers after greek gods.
Firewall - ARES: god of war.
File Server - ATHENA: goddess of wisdom.
Mail Server - HERMES: messenger of the gods.
The only things which I have had the privilege to name lately are, unfortunately, only routers.
When I got an AirPort Extreme, I named it "Stanley".
When that broke down, and the router that came with FiOS was handling most of the work again, I named it "Morgan"
Then I realized: the FiOS router came first, so really I ended up naming the two routers "Morgan Stanley".
People name computers because it makes good sense. Although computers don't have self-awareness and thus intrinsic personalities, they are subject to the natural tendency for people to project personalities on them based on behavior and appearance. People who don't project personality onto other objects and people probably have a personality disorders themselves, like Asperger's syndrome. But the projection of personality by humans is a mnemonic that aides in remembering a particular blend of traits of a person (or other object) and is thus a practical habit. People name a machine to make a slot in their memory for its personality and then fill in that slot as they learn about their machine. In this sense, systematic names like server01, server02, server03, etc., are not unique enough to be helpful because they can not easily be differentiated by the normal person.
Just callin' it like I see it.
My client has that one ... awesome funny - but confusing as hell with names like
Fonzie
Potsie
Joanie
Pinky
Chachie
Arnold
RalphMalph
Al
Howard
Marion
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
OK so this might be a waste of resources, but most of our machines are dedicated to one role. For instance, ftp is on it's own. One, because it's public facing. Sure, kinda a waste of a resource but on the counterpoint you dont need a lot of power for an FTP server.
for machines that are multi-purpose, we either throw it on a VM and let it play by itself only eating up a license, or we put it on an apps server, such as apps1 and apps2 or apps3. Yes, when apps3 goes down we have to think for a moment what that affects but it's a tad bit better than some random name. At least I know if apps3 goes down it's not a webserver, that's web1 and web2. That info is helpful at 3am.
And last, if a server's role changes, then so does it's name. We typically wipe the machine too and build the OS again.
The previous admin team used names of different wines but we thought that was pretty ghey so now it's all Futurama based... Bender, Flexo, Fry, Leela, Nibbler, Farnsworth, Elzar, Calculon, Hermes, Morbo, Zoidberg, etc.
I was a network admin for a small law office, and I named all their computers after medical conditions. I named the senior partner's computer 'IMPOTENCE' hoping that someday he'd come to me and tell me that he was having problems with impotence and that he couldn't get it to come up.
I am a developer who has to perform system admin roles in support of my applications. Based on the problems I always had with stability of Windows machines compared to the Unix machines I deal with, I named Windows machines after sunken ships and Unix machines after vacation spots.....
Tim
Body parts, famous authors, historic events positions in the Karma Sutra, we name our servers after something to make them easier to remember. *NEWSFLASH* that's why the servers allow you to name them and don't automatically assign a name from a unique id.
Hey Fred we seem to be having a problem on a2faf98 I can't seem to mount /fucknuckle from c4f61f03 but it works fine from ac9989fb.
My next naming scheme for servers is, um, erh, I know, slashdot users who come up with the most interesting naming scheme for servers. So none of my servers will be called MrKaos.
Q. Why do we name servers? A. Because we can.My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Rudeness is always appropriate for private machines. So I name mine using euphemisms for female anatomy.
A female friend of mine didn't really appreciate the name "splitlips" and asked me to give the computer a "nice name" instead. So I added a CNAME for "nicename" and told her to use it. What she didn't realize until she actually logged into the shell was that I'd changed her Bash prompt to say "my nice name is still splitlips $"
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
I use a new source of names every couple of years, so then I can remember how old individual systems are based on their names. For instance, I know that gloin was manufactured in 2005, because that's when we bought six computers to use as PACs and named them after dwarves from Tolkein. We aren't still using gloin as a PAC; it has changed roles. But because it kept its name, I still know that it was purchased as part of that batch, in 2005.
...), or, quite frankly, whatever.
Other naming schemes I've used include cities in Australia, protagonists who died in the Dragonbone Chair series, types of dinosaurs (e.g., trex, diplodocus), rooms (e.g., narthex is the gateway to the outside world on my home network), and, recently, Shakespearean characters.
Ones I might use in the future include baroque composers, US Presidents, prefectures of Japan, adverbs that don't end in ly, kings of Israel and/or Judah, noun cases, famous assassins and serial killers, Star Trek starship classes, large islands, colors, desserts, birds of prey, named swords (excalibur, brightnail, indreju, kvalnir, glamdring, sting,
It doesn't actually matter very much *WHAT* the scheme is. The point is that each chunk of hardware needs a name that sticks to it unambiguously even after you repurpose it three times. Frankly I'm tempted to start naming monitors, as well as computers.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I always liked to name a server Elvis because when I ping it the reply is;
Elvis is alive
I keep a list of womens'/girls' names I like around for various reasons, and I pull names with appropriate meanings from there. Currently my laptop is Melantha ("dark flower"/black laptop), my PS3 is Integra (as it's hard to get the thing not to act as a media convergence device), and my new (silver) iPod is Seraph. My last iPod was Siren.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
We had a series of Unix boxes back in the early 90's with names like Butch, Spanky, Alfalfa, Barney, Clyde...
There was some confusion about the last two names. When asked, the system administrator said, "You know... Barney & Clyde... the gangsters...". /sigh
My favorite server names ever. My best friend and I used them to VPN our LAN's together
Back in the uucp days, we named our machine "gang".
Think about it...
-- Terry
just keeping them simple and memorable...
swingline for the beloved box mngmnt keeps wanting to take away...
I like to name my machines after Batman Characters The file server is Alfred, the most production server is Batman, the backup is Nightwing, and the clients are Robin, Batgirl, Huntress, and various other past Batman sidekicks. As someone said, I think it has more to do with A: whimsy, and B: a passive aggressive means of defying our corporate overlords. Naming conventions are fun.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
I once had to set up a new network where the only existing computer was a Linux machine named Tux. The other machines were a mix of Solaris an SGI boxes, but I decided to continue the 'existing' naming scheme by naming them all after cartoon penguins. I thought it was going to be hard, but it turned out pretty easy: Pogo, ChillyWilly, Feathers, Tennesse, etc.
Parenting freedom.
Somebody has to make medical choices for babies, and in cases where outcome is controversial (is it better to remove the foreskin or leave it?) that judgment rightfully lies with the parents.
Note, however, that male circumcision (no significant long-term loss of function) is not in the same world as female "circumcision", which causes a permanent loss of function.
So you kinda got it right, it's just that your example of male circumcision doesn't really meet the threshold of harm significant enough to override parental choice.
paintball
The problem is, over the years, I start to find that my original naming scheme no longer appeals to me, so when I get a new box, it usually ends up with a different name.
The first with a proper name was a desktop: Morpheus (after the Matrix character). Next was a laptop: Trinity.
Then I got sick of The Matrix, so when I bought two desktops, one to use as a headless server (fileserver, mailserver, etc), I used Halo names: Grunt (server) and Elite (desktop).
I got a Mac, and decided it should have a wholly different name -- Eve, after the Applegeeks robot.
And now I have a shiny new Dell laptop running Ubuntu, named Serenity, after everyone's favorite Firefly-class transport.
Plus a Slicehost slice named Kernel...
I've worked at places that had consistent naming schemes, and those were worse -- one was based on metallurgy, so servers had names like Cobalt, Chromium, Molybdenum, etc. Cobalt was fine, Chromium was fine, but to type (and remember!) Molybdenum was pushing it. As confusing as my own naming scheme is, at least they're all relatively easy words.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Mine's waffledome. I couldn't decide between "wafflehouse" and "thunderdome."
"Hostnames are not documentation."
Many, many, many times have I had to chide another foolish junior sys admin for stupid naming schemes.
Here are my DO NOTs for hostnames;
1.) DO NOT use your hostname as documentation. Do not use the name to indicate it's location, what it does, or who operates it.
This one comes up over and over again because stupid admin wants to name his server "WizCorp-fs-001". I then remind him if he has a problem remembering what company he works for, because the hosts fully qualified name is "wizcorp-fs-001.wizcorp.com". Why not just name it "wizcorp-fs-001.wizcorp-server-room-001.california.wizcorp-IT-department.wizcorp.com" and get the stupid to the max right off the bat?
Dumbass admin # 2 wants his servers to have their location in their hostname, such as dbhost.PHX.wizcorp.com. This is all good, until the host needs to move to Nevada. Nice work there dumbass.
Generally, this one just goes hand-in-hand with admins who can't keep any documentation about their work.
The exception to the above is for special hosts, such as network devices, local resources (IP-enabled things that won't ever move, like an AC unit or environmental monitor), and cluster hosts. ISPs do this, and noob-admins see what the big guys are doing and somehow thinks that their piddly 500-staff office company needs to do the same thing.
--
2.) DO NOT make a hostname unpronounceable. There are three primary places where a hostname gets used; on the keyboard, on the label, and on the phone. If I can't go in with my cell phone to the computer room, read the label exactly as it should be sanely pronounced to another admin on the phone, and he can't accurately type it out after two tries, it's a bad hostname.
If your hostname is fs-01-PHX.6FL, you're probably an idiot. Again, hostnames are not documentation, and you need to be able to pronounce it. I can't pronounce that crap.
And, while we are on the subject, what is the problem with you people who can't label your hosts? If I was your boss, I would walk into the server room after every new host was installed with a checklist of things to make sure you didn't screw up. If you failed to label a host, you would get one warning, and then be fired. It's REALLY important that someone be able to find the host after an outage -- you won't be able to tell what the host is based on the monitor output, because it's dead! I would not be bitter about this one if it wasn't a problem over and over and over and over...
--
3.) DO NOT use as many special characters in your hostname as you can dream up, especially the dash "-" and underscore "_". I'm talking to YOU WINDOWS admin.
Windows admins are more guilty of this than anyone else. First, they name their firewalls fw1-DEN1 and fw1-DEN2, and then they name their switches sw1_DEN1 and sw2_DEN1. WTG there dummy; you just caused untold frustration for years and years to come as I guess if you're character-of-the-day was an underscore or dash.
In general, DO NOT use hyphens/dashes or underscores in hostnames, or something even worse. I've had an actual experience where an organization used underscores on some hosts, hyphens on others, but their label maker could not do underscores, so they always used hyphens on the labels. Lots of fun when you are trying to figure out why you can't ping "web_0001.foobie.com".
--
4.) DO NOT name your new replacement host after your old host. It's a new host, give it a new name.
I don't know many times I've had to deal with the aftermath of this one, but it's a lot. If it's new hardware, it's a new hostname. Get over it. You need to get creative again an
Our datacenter is filled with warplanes. Databases uses old fighter plane names such as mustang and zero. The app servers use european jets such as typhoon and gripen. Linux boxes are named after american codes for Russian jets such as fulcrum and foxbat. But when we add about 30 new servers and devices, we decided to create a naming scheme for all of the devices, ports, etc etc. Thus we end up with: hqdom3 for the the third HQ domain controller dccmsapp1 for the first cms app server on our DR site hqsan1sc1 for HQ first IBM DS SAN switch no. 1 and hqsan1se1pw2pdu2 for the 2nd power cable of the first storage expansion for the first DS SAN that os connected to the first PDU of the storage rack....
Our dark corner of the net at work uses names like Cain, Nosferatu, Antediluvian, Magus... Cain was the main Linux server, so I named our main Windows server Abel.
Linux servers are named after the beer I was drinking when I did the install. BSD servers are named after the hard liquor I was drinking during the install. Workstations are named after Renaissance painters that are not already ninja turtles.
you don't eat crackers in the bed of your future--or else you'll get all scratchy
My first self-built gaming rig inspired my last naming scheme - I called it Godzilla. After that followed Rodin, Mothra, and Ghidorah. Now, all that's left of that network is my first Mac, which, of course, I had to call Jet Jaguar. :P
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
goatse, tubgirl, lemonparty, thepounder, bigbag, dickcream, thatsnotsexy, hai2u, ect. You'll never run out of server names.
Wow, why has nobody posted this yet? Too obvious? I doubt it, considering the awful ways I've seen people name computers;
RFC1178 - Choosing a name for your computer
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html
Lots of good, timeless advice.
Years ago, circa Win95, one of our network mounted drives was so slow, that I changed the Volume Name through the Properties to 'Sloth'. At the time I thought this change was only to my local mounting of the drive. A few years later I found Wrath, Gluttony, Envy and Pride quitely holding their place next to Sloth on the network. I had inadvertedly started a naming convention within the company! Never did find the Lust or Greed drives. :(
I used to be the sysadmin for a high school, and we had a very simple, straightforward server naming convention. My two WS2003 member servers were leon-ms10 and leon-ms11, "Leon" being the name of my school. Computers? leon-007809, or whatever the asset tag number was.
These names were prescribed by my district overlords, but I chose an equally simple name for printers: "leon-roomnumber" or "leon-deptname", followed by "-large" for large-format inkjets--and "-color" for color printers.
The printer in my office, AKA room 1108C? "\\leon-ms11\leon-1108c".
Where I work now, I'm not directly involved in naming stuff. The network printer nearest my cube? "\\cit-fs10\thnw-laser-05". It tells the building name (thnw), and that it's a laser printer, but no indication of its physical location.
Nonetheless, I love my current job. You know I love my job when my biggest gripe is about a weird printer naming convention. :-)
First server was nobody, followed by righty, lefty, and fleshlight.
Next up is fido.
What? I just need an echomail gateway.
paintball
It seemed like half the servers were named 'hobbes'?
My first set of servers, routers, and such were named for Norse gods. Thor, Fenris, Loki, Odin, and Osiris was thrown in cause someone liked it.
My second set for another ISP got flower names. Rose, Iris, Lily, Calla, Peony (big mistake), it went on for a while.
Much nicer than wppwd534, for instance.
Then I got functional, and it was SERVER1, SERVER2, DBSERVER, POPSERVER, CMSERVER. Boring.
I wouldn't be so creative today. My current server and only one I actually keep online is named 'cyber'. woot.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
My home network server names?
Ryan, Ramius, and Greer. I'm *positive* no one will figure out this theme. :-P
And I'm as equally sure no one can guess the role of my machine named gffx. :-P
My laptop is named Hatter
My old G4 tower is named Alice
The Laser Printer is Bandersnatch
The WIFI Router (and thus wifi network): JubJubBird
My household server is named Duchess
The two VOIP phones are TweedleDee and TweedleDum
The DSL Modem (and Gateway to the tubes): Dormouse
I am Marchie.
~Donald / Just RTFM
A printer, named godot.
must be one of those guys who write software with 3-letter variable names... Why not name a mailserver something friendly as "MailServer-Primary", "MailServer-Backup" ? Is "Nas1" "NAme Server #1" or "Network Attached Storage #1" or "Not Another Server #1" ???? Or "Nude Anal Shit #1" ?
Servers, network printers and Linux workstations get a cute name.
All servers, printers, and workstations get a standardized boring name in addition.
Hostnames on the machines are set to standardized-cute, such as v16filer2-quark.
An A record exists for all of the standard names. A CNAME exists for all the cute ones.
The cutesie names are a big help to the people that use that particular machine frequently. They're accessible via either, but shell prompts show both (which reinforces both, over time). Hostnames are obviously what show up in automated alerts. All machines have a sticker with both, cutesie one in larger font - eventually you'll learn where thrall is but much less likely to remember the official name.
The (good) devs usually elect to have a Linux workstation, and they get to pick their own name.
Some of the 'mascots' which have appeared on the stickers are certainly quite amusing
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
All our dev servers used to be named after porn stars. however that is no longer the case, we now run over 2000 servers and cool names while amusing makes for nightmare management problems once you go beyond a 100 or so servers.
The server names I use for my hacker training classes are: Hindenburg and Titanic :)
The domain is going.down
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
And a server that serves more than 1 role?
Virtualization to the rescue!
One place I worked installed seven identical server machines, so named them happy, dopey, sneezy, doc, etc.
Later, another set of servers was installed, and the sysadmin chose to name them after mountains in the California coastal range. All was well until he named one of the servers "umunhum", a well-known peak. Trouble was, no one could ever remember how to spell it, so using it was a real pain and often not successful. That one got renamed soon enough.
At UPenn, the machines in each computer lab had a theme, and one was dances: swing, lindy, foxtrot, etc. The login message, along with upcoming events, included a short description of the dance.
This also led to that particular room being called 'the dance lab'.
(Somehow, the one with 'temerity' and other adjectives was just called 207A.)
You're the new guy they just hired to replace him. Who cares about CNAMEs when you're on the server looking at the hostname? Someone tells you 'daffy' and 'kirk' are down. What are they? What do they do?
If you don't know CNAMEs, you probably shouldn't have been hired to manage the network since it's a big part of how things work there. Just like you shouldn't have been hired if they used NIS and you didn't know that. Or WINS. Or whatever. Maybe that's not your fault; I doubt the people hiring you might know that.
But if you're frankly too damned uninformed to try nslookup or even just try pinging or remote logging into the frakkin' machine, maybe you shouldn't have lied on your resume and your experience managing systems and should go back to working at Kinkos.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
All of our servers are based on Greek or Roman mythology. We have a high-availability failover box for one of our more important servers. The server MUST absolutely be "up at all times".
The HA failover for it is named Priapus.
And in case you need it spelled out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priapus
Above link *might* be marginally offensive if you can't handle tasteful paintings of ancient Greek schlongs...
I have servers named after dead scientists, Curie, Einstein, Darwin, Franklin, Newton.
Development machines are dead philosophers, Jefferson, Voltaire, Nietzsche (the Windows machine).
I think I would name them after Middle-earth characters if I had to do it over again though.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
You can name servers? And here I was memorizing IPs ...
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
We were up to 200 or so by the time I left that job. Aside from Speed Racer characters, they were not anime names. That was fun!
I worked at a defense contractor where we named them after the then President's scores: there was Paula, Monica, Jennifer and Hillary.
Worked at a print shop that had a bunch of film imagesetters. When we got the first few, we started with Groucho and Harpo. When we ran out of brothers' names and bought a large one, we named it minnie. And when we bought one more, we named it Karl.
Oh, that zany, zany CIA. I can't think of anything more whimsical than names of states! Oh, the hilarity!
*sigh*
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
Except I was going to contribute names that are a little more relevant...
In our office we have really outdated computers that are constantly freezing up and incapable of running modern software. Their names are "Two-Toed Sloth," "Bob Slowski," and "Manatee."
The previous story links to a previous story too.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
I worked for an American company that was doing a joint project with several Japanese companies. The project name was named Orion. I had to name about 25 unix workstations. The first names I thought of were Rigel and Betelgeuse. I named all of the workstations after stars. Polaris, Arcturus, Antares..etc My favorite was Electra. The Japanese were very pleased with the names. My own workstation has always been named nitro. I never know if it will blow up or run fast like nitro powered dragsters.
Ummm, some of us liberals are just as pissed at this guy as you are? Just because you're a partisan hack, don't assume the other side is.
RFB, lol.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
The network at my parents home is "Mirkwood" with an old desktop called "Bilbo" and a laptop "Frodo". The printer is of course "Sting". I doubt my parents will ever understand, since they never read the books and even fell asleep watching the movie :O
at my first company, all of our servers were named after planets from star wars and all the workstations were characters - jabba and greedo were my main and dev machines and our exchange server was the deathstar
calling all destroyers
I was once told of a chemical company that named their servers after chemical names. Correspondingly, the ip address corresponded to the atomic number of the element. Thus, xxx.xxx.xxx.001 - Hydrogen xxx.xxx.xxx.002 - Helium etc.
I'm posting this from Callisto. I also have systems named Europa and Ganymede. My laptop naming scheme is slightly different: I have two of them, named Perihelion and Aphelion.
It is not exciting but it gets the job done.
Laptops: LT-[badge]
Workstations: WS-[badge]
Servers: SV-[badge]
Printers: PR-[badge]
Switches: SW-[badge]
Routers: RT-[badge]
Phones: PH-[badge]
Where [badge] is the asset number, e.g. 50014
Commonly used servers get an alias, grouped by type, such as directory servers (big cats), email servers (astronomical), database servers (unusual mammals), etc.
My routers have been named after different cities. My first wireless router before college was called Sydney. When it died, we brought up Melbourne. When I moved to college I decided to go on with the naming scheme, but change countries, so then Tokyo, Kyoto, and when I moved off-campus, Beijing. Now that I've graduated college, Beijing's name changed to Paris, and then we bought a new router called Madrid.
My transient drives (until recently, when i lose pen drives only a little more hesitantly than pens) were named after female characters from Neil Gaiman books, so Door, Coraline, Eostre, Death, Anathema, Yvaine, etc.
My desktops and laptops have taken a few different naming schemes, but they used to be translations of things to do with writing, so Author, Pen, Word, Paper. Then I went greek myth when I got a Mac: Siren. When I got my newest machine it had a large circular blaring blue light on the front, so of course it became Cyclops.
For completely unknown reasons, my Eee is named Cygnus.
With so many antidepressants on the market I never have a shortage of server names. Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Cymbalta, Effexor......
On my Windows/Linux dual boot machine, I initially had two hard drives, and I named them Primary and Secondary. Then I got a few more, and now I've got them going through Tertiary, Quaternary, Quinary, and Senary.
Ours are named after tennis players... because they are good at serving.
The file server ozzel was of course, intentionally named as he was soon replaced by piett and veers.
Most users got to name theirs, but for public terminals we had luke, leia, c3po, r2d2, dak, and wedge. The last two being my favorites, and I still tend to use those names for desktops.
My first mac laptop was 'rome' since most other apple names were too long (winesap, braeburn, etc) and it made a nice play on words with 'roam'. I abandoned that for moons of Jupiter or Saturn. This was typed from 'tethys'.
Main Server: scrooge (always) ...
Secondary: donald
From there on: huey, louie, dewey, daisy
My notebooks: hortense, quackmore (Donald's parents)
Other servers: swamphole, pothole, SirQuackly,
Backup-Machines: scrooge-ii, donald-ii, huey-ii, etc...
Not used: Gladstone (don't like to have a server working based solely on luck...)
Worst:
ASDEBLNXCH01 (AutoScout, Germany, Berlin, Exchange-Server 01) - that was because these were Windows machines (brrr) - while I was working for Scout24-Group...
My home network is all named for the outer planes in D&D. The firewall is nirvana, the general-purpose mail/web/ldap server is limbo, one of the normal hosts is paradise. The non-host devices are named after the elemental planes - the printer is earth. There are a whole ton of names left, including lots of sub-planes. There are 7 sub-planes of the Seven Heavens, f'rinstance: lunia, mercuria, venya, solania, mertion, jovar, and chronias, in addition to heaven. I've got 90 hostnames in my zonefile, only a few of which are being used right now.
A couple of jobs ago, we had a set of machines which ran an Oracle stack. fred and barney were the DB nodes; pebbles, bambam, and dino were the app layer; and wilma and betty were the web heads. It was easy to talk about the Flintstones gang, when referring to the whole stack.
Shortened versions of Dylan songs, like my username is.
atraintocry: "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry"
other names: babyblue, highway61, hurricane, isis, johanna, corrina
I'm the only one that needs to know the names, so I went with some that made me happy. That was after I realized that hardware based names are very hard to remember.
On a lark I started naming my servers after ships mentioned in Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch and that oil drilling program. So far I've gone through "Mighty Servant", "Harbinger", "Maverick", "Timebandit" (which was indeed a huge waste of time) and "Journeyman". It's amazing how inventive these captains are :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadliest_Catch#Vessels
Names should be distinct, easy to spell, memorable and as much unrelated to the computers task as possible. F.i. don't name your computer "vip-files-and-billing-server", it's like adding a sign "Please hack here to steal valuable data". The name also shouldn't reflect the OS, for two reasons:
1.) "Vista01" says "Please use exploit XYZ do hack me"
2.) If your computer is named "Linux" it will be much more difficult to figure out the host and operating system in an error or log message. Consider "Linux has failed to access connection" and "charliebrown has failed to access connection." Not only is the second one more funny, it also is easyer to figure out.
BTW, my CompNames are allmost all from some or other Gibson novel:
wintermute, freeside (A Laptop, of course), straylight, countzero, idoru
Out of line: heatmachine (gets hot :-) ), engine (was the powerhorse at one time)
Somehow I'd find it uncool to suddenly switch to Neal Stephenson naming. But since I'm currently reading the bridge trioligy, there are still enough names to go around.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I name my computer and gadgets after various variations on "Chickmagnet".
My desktop computer is named 'Crystal'. I suspect I'm a 'crysmal' or something...
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
While I was working at MS, I had my desktop machine named 'BillG', and a good friend of mine had his box name 'SteveB'. We got some funny looks from co-workers when the subject came up, but never a single complaint from corp security or the suits. I was tickled that nobody up to that point has thought to do something like that. At one point, I was planning on installing MS-Bob on 'BillG', but I never got around to it. For shame...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Beatrice, Gabrielle, Anne-Marie, Dominique, Eliane, Isabelle and Claudine.
Breweries for servers, ales for workstations.
Servers were: Stella, Celis and Hoegaarden
Workstations: Kwak, Leffe and Jupiler.
Well, maybe you can guess. I'm from Belgium (hence the Celis reference ;-) )
Back in the eighties all of my files and apps were kept for years on . . . . wait for it . . . 3 and a half inch floppies, all kept in a little box. Each new disk was named it after some "cute girl" I knew or had known, mostly ones from the NYC high school I went to, which was perfect since I got my first "real" computer at CMU in Pittsburgh. Each one was for a given subject with that subject meant to match the personality of the girl in question. Audrey was science, Rosemary was english, Anna was organizational stuff, etc. I even drew little pictures on each disk label.
In those days disks were expensive and more robust than you would think so my little stack lasted for years. Long enough for me to have moved back to NYC and have the inevitable happen - various of these girls ended up dropping by my place and discovering "their" disk. This rarely went well. And if you think that that was dicey, it didn't even compare to the reactions of girls who would come by my place for the first time and discover these so very thought out evocations of previous girls they didn't know about.
"So who is Audrey? Who is Simona?"
"Will you name a disk after me?"
"What subject would I be?"
Trust me on this, guys, don't do it. It will only end in grief.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Fwiw, for about eight years now I've been naming each box after a progressively more recent person who brought us closer to databases.
Hesiod
MarcusB (after Marcus Aurelius)
FrancisBacon
Sam (after Samuel Johnson)
etc.
Always wanted to have a Voltaire but ended up using that one for a machine that fubared.
I've just now decided to switch entirely. Maybe colors this time.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
kitkat ...
mars
twix
aero
bounty
snickers
we chose from a wikipedia link for chocolate bars, here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chocolate_bar_brands
CNAMEs are good. Using multiple A records is a bad idea that will screw up Kerberos, confuse ssh, and eat your children.
Also, beware when you first start a job and all the production servers are running never-updated Gentoo behind a m0n0wall gateway.
I have a Rick-Roll trojan-redirect AccessPoint up in a tree with an SSID of "Enterprize"; it has absolute coverage for 4 miles line-of-sight in California from Lake Forest to Laguna Beach; a rackmount Alpha with 2-weeks of UPS called "data", a PDA named "ziggy", a Wristwatch embedded computer named "Dich Chafey", a cell phone named "awhora", and a bunch of wireless IP cameras named HAL{#}, I think I have all my fan-fiction covered. I never had a nack for naming computers after pornstars because they were meant to be publicly accessed by sane individuals.
I have better things to do, like concealing my pot-growing hydroponics garden within the cavities of classic arcade consoles that use flat-panel screen and embedded slim form factor (I learned this from when I worked at Bullwinkles and Chuck E. Cheezes).
There are good reasons to give meaningful names to servers. If you give them numerical "names," getting 1 character wrong results in pointing to the wrong machine. If you give them distinct names with redundant information, this is much less likely.
Furthermore, it's absolutely essential to give every machine a name that's distinct from its task. Trust me, one day, that "mailserver" or that "webserver01" might not be doing mail or web serving at all, and you will find that changing the name is more of a problem than you thought.
So recently I had to work on a 200 new server setup; I took the list of star names on Wikipedia, sanitized it a little to remove names too long or or that were too much like another one.
you start booting bottom.
Bundy,
f,
bert-the-fat,
ectra,
toids,
imony,
exis,
one,
otta-fagina,
ert,
oompa,
alaland,
eavebeforeyouallshootatmeortracemyIPonthisAOLtypesh!tbbye.
You mean to say "If Pants is down, then we are fucked", not "If Pants are down..."
In my case, I have a host named "anenome." On that host, I have virtualized 10 servers into sandboxed Virtual Machines, each named as a "polyp" of some sort.
The company I work for uses the names of the Simpson's for their servers...
RFC1178 - Choosing a name for your computer
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I just name my servers after the very original character names from FF1 so we have... Blackmage Whitemage Redmage Thief Fighter etc... etc... sadly there are no humourous adventures in 8 bit sprites for me to report.
Uh, perhaps you can help me? I'm looking for a love-potion aerosol, that I can spray on a certain Penthouse Pet, to obta
I totally disagree with calling this article "from the just-no-more-muppets-please dept", since one of the best naming schemes is (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/262657/the-coolest-server-names):
Unix boxes named after Greek gods (Apollo, Zeus, etc.)
Windows machines named after Muppets (Fozzy, Beaker, etc.)
Depending on the year of deployment and relation to other servers and services, we have namespaces of minerals, godzilla monsters, fruit names, lord of the rings characters, etc...
Adds some fun to functionality :)
One sysadmin (you still out there igb?) named all our Sun workstations after Bob Dylan songs, some were rather long.
Names of my various computers:
Azaka, Kamedaki, SDF-1, Omoikane, Nadesico, King Kaioh...
And I don't even really like anime.
I name my computers after philosophers.
In current use are Descartes, Turing, and Sartre.
my current server however is called butler...
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
#I prever Norse G-ds, over 100 in one go! .|\
lynx -dump -nolist http://thenorsegods.com/|\
grep '\*.*-'|\
awk '{print $2}'|\
tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'|\
grep -n
sed -e's/^/10.0.1./'|\
tr ':' '\t' >>/etc/hosts
Isako
Kagami
Sakura
Arturia Mini
Rythymeen
Konata
TLG-N5200-FS2
TLG-ZX2000-AS1
Poseidon
We had machines named Gandalf (big file server), Thorin (router), Dwalin (small server) and Dwarf1, Dwarf2 till Dwarf24. You get it.
I recently started a new job in a small company, it would be much easier for me to remember everybody's name if they had functional names, "manager", "warehouse guy 1", "warehouse guy 2", "receptionist", "accountant", etc.
At work I prefer OS+function, like redsmtp, debweb and ubusql.
At home I have only seven computers that are active, all named after dead dogs: laika, wolf, pasha, shaka, barry, raika, blacky. (Appliances are named after Buffy/Angel characters)
cheers,
paul
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
I've named all my personal electronics that can be named. New Macbook is Brock, the 12 inch Powerbook is Helper, my iPod touch is DrGirlfriend, and my AirportExtreme and wireless net is VentureLabs. My old 3rd Gen iPod is named Rusty. I never got around to naming my hard drives anything other than LACIE1 or WD2, or renaming Macintosh HD to anything memorable.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
unimatrixseven
uni = desktop
seven = 7th GNU/Linux
dimatrixfive ...
di = laptop
trimatrixzero ...
tri = netbook
and so on.
Astronomers renamed Uranus to Urectum.
Anything you use in conversation, we had a server called paper (named for us) so every time I said 'is on paper' everyone looked at the printer. Its now called pace (our theme is collective nouns)
I've actually had the misfortune of consulting for a company whose servers' primary DNS names were something like rbp. Or something to that effect.
And we're talking a J2EE bonanza where a simple call created a storm of calls to a random server from the next tier. Load balanced cluster(fuck), see. So you'd see in the logs that you got called by machine asdfghjkr05b09p03 with some highly erroneous parameters. Now take a fucking guess which actual machine that is.
The naming scheme was obviously excellent for Mordac The Preventer Of IT Services... er... I mean for the IT department which had to service those blades, but a nightmare for everyone else.
Of course, they tried to do something for the users to, so they got aliased... to something equally non-mnemonic.
Give me cutesy names instead any day.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Ok, let's try again. The naming scheme was <long_non_mnemonic_string>r<rack_number>b<blade_number>p<partition_number>
Geesh, I swear it's the only forum as retarded as not to quote angular brackets when posting as Plain Old Text
. I mean, Jesus F. Christ, if I wanted my text interpreted as HTML, I could have chosen that option from the combo box.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Try 'ping www.utc.fr' (that's my university's webserver), you'll find a little joke made by my university's sysadmins.
I admit this is a single server name, without any kind of consistency with the rest of the network, but I find it a good answer to the "worst names" for a server...
I had "hork", "gob", "loog", "spit", "snot", and "bogey". They were known as "The snot boxes"
Medusa, Maria Antoinette, Robespierre, Danton, Hidalgo, Boleyn, Howard, Holofernes...
I inherited a network of Digimon-named computers. Only the servers were named sensible names like 'fileserver'.
The users didn't know what 'zodomon' and 'Gomamon' was, and I had no idea which one was what.
When I questioned the previous admins, none would own up to the naming scheme...
I work for an Australian company where one of the ex-systems administrators decided to name some systems after places in the world. Even something like "Japan" or "China" would be nice, but this guy picked absolutly silly names.
Nothing like getting woken up by the monitoring systems at 3am and trying to SSH into a host which you can't remember how to spell. Vogelsberg, who the hell names a server vogelsberg?!
This is alternately good and bad - some are short - in one case only one syllable (vao), but some or more (one is called utuaoteolopuka). Thing is there seems to be a nearly endless supply of names, some of which seem very similar to each other.
I know the boss has a reason for doing this, but that won't make me like it any more.
... and today's pet project has
When I was working on the reservation system for EuroDisney in Paris, I named the two servers in a cluster "Micquis" an "Pluteau".
The reason we have this naming scheme is because it looks good in a spreadsheet. At best we get to pick that it's a generic application server, and a location for it. Y'know, the kind of thing that would be dead easy to get from the fact that it's also in .apps.site.company.com
There's far too many people making these decisions based on a 'flat file' approach to naming, when we've been able to to hierarchical for ages.
Hamming distance is communication theory to prevent transposition errors - it states that two symbols should be more than a certain distance apart to increase correctability of errors. A long list of nearly identical server names defeats this quite nicely, and ends up with you wondering if they said 'app47b' or 'app47d' in a noisy datacentre.
At one place I worked, the firewall was a machine named Cerberus. Although, as someone else mentioned, machines have a tendency to get repurposed without ever having their names changed.
You mean how over time they start out shiny and amusing and eventually get plodding and depressing? Or have I got the names confused?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
For the last 8 years I've named all my systems after demons, except in a few instances. I used to work with a born again christian who didn't like the naming scheme very much and used to counter with religious names (he was a junior sysad with responsibility for a handful of our 200+ systems). Most have CNAME records that are more benign but even when users find out the real names they don't tend to care.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
I once worked at a company named "virtual heaven" and while the desktops had names from star trek like odo, picard the servers took their names from greek and egyptian gods, ra, nuit, isis, pan, seth. Coincidentially, the company went broke not too long after we got that file server named eris.
I still name computers after things up in the sky, using bird names. Spatz, fink, star, triel, dohle, I soon run out of short names in German, luckily I discovered Maori birds: tui, kea, weka kaki, moa, tara,kiwi, beo - ample suply of short pronouncable names.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
I've had various naming schemes at employers. One, it was sea creatures (the name of the company was The Pond). Another, military aircraft (the owner was a vet who spent his Army years flying helicopters). Another, the staff picked so it was a mishmash, though our SpamAssassin cluster used names of successful US presidential assassins (though when we got to McKinley's and couldn't spell it, it was marking the end of the meme). Yet another, trees.
For my personal stuff, though, I use names of famous dogs, and I try not to recycle them. I've used Toto, Fido, Speck, Einstein, Astro, Scooby, Nipper, Laika, Strelka, and a lot more. My latest are Gromit (can't believe that in 10 years I'd never used it!) and Petey.
The effect is very similar to street names in a city.
Some places call the streets: first, second, third etc, but
often names are used, and in subdivision quite often name
with themes are used
In the Physics Department where I study students' terminal are all named after famous physicists.
Back in the old days: The MIT AI Lab used Lisp Machines, each one named after a dead rock star. (Each machine had a pic of their namesake.) The machines went forth and multiplied, so the admins ran out of rock stars and resorted to dead actors. Curiously, one machine was named after then-president Reagan, who was not held in the highest esteem. Then one day, the funding agents came through. It's all fun and games until the DoD gets pissed.
My previous company, I named machines after planets and their satellites. Computer scientists as well. I used to like naming things, naming things are part of computer programming after all.
One wag called his computer "monday". my personal computers went from poets, composers to names from Firefly.
My current company:wg837373737, sl87, bc20 etc etc. My machine is "called" w72727 or somesuch beigey name. Welcome to corporate computing. Yuch.
I always liked my old universities mathematics and computing departments naming scheme, they used Tolkien names, (i.e aragorn, smaurg, bilbo), there are loads of good names in the average sci fi or fantasy series. My personal machine is Pern after the planet in Anne McCaffery's dragon riders of Pern series, but I hate works stupid server1 and syd1 scheme.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
*lowers shield* I think this is some form of subtle social engineering. After all, naming computers is second only to password-creating, and both activities could use the same schema *raises shield*
have a server called blackbird thought maybe it crashes because of the name! so we standardized servers still crash Now I know its Windows
as it is eaten so it shall pass
Mine are pretty simple..... HAL9000, Skynet, ED209, etc....
gabriel.vatican.va michael.vatican.va uriel.vatican.va raphael.vatican.va etc
This could be the greatest mother-in-law joke: the server that is usually fine, but "has its moments".
There are all the aunts and uncles, cousins, and nephews, nieces, and their spouses, with all their familial relationships and occasional infighting. (Why can't they communicate?)
Oh, plus a special case of 'family' for cream on the cake: former boy/girl friends of children and those in the last category.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
We have been using the names of famous criminals such as Bonnie, Clyde, Carmine, Bugsy, Charlie, and of course Rosie [O'Donnell].
I have a black desktop computer I built last year for Linux use. It's pretty much the center of my universe. I named it 'DarkTower'
I use names based on the comic "Asterix and Obelix" for Unix servers, names of famous crooks and designers (repectively for windows and apple computers). All characters in Asterix end with ix, and the other naming schemes are evident.
30 years ago, a newbie in the industry, I was given a machine and told to name it. I wanted something short, easy to remember, and easy to spell. So it became "sex"; the managers were not amused. Well, live and learn. At any rate, you live. (You also panic.)
Naming machines --especially ones with different form factors-- is an easy way to differentiate them when communicating with other humans. In my house alone we have: Big Mac, Mac Sr., Mac Jr., Grohl, and Shitty_PC. Big is a large iMac, Sr. is a G4 Power Mac, Jr. is a white Macbook, Grohl is our new aluminum Macbook (long live the foo fighters) and Shitty_PC, complete with required underscore, is, well, our shitty Compaq XP machine.
Having spent some time with the guy, I'd suggest it's more accurate to say "RonJeremy never shuts up." Fun guy but too hyper for me.
Sabrina, Sara, und Arlette.
What?
Seems fitting as each day into work I feel I'm heading 'right into the danger zone'.
Mirage, Wideload, Bluestreak, Soundwave are some of the servers I hit every day. And to be honest its a whole lot easier to remember than DOM083, WEBSVR083, or POSTOFFICE083 ever was.
The most memorable naming scheme I've used was based on DC/Marvel super heroes and super villains. IIRC, non Unix machines were Marvel names and unix-like machines were DC names.
When we ran out of those, we threw in constellations and stars. I think that reached >=1022 hostnames, which was the goal.
The stiff shirts in the sysadmin group felt the names were unprofessional. When I pointed out that CNAMEs were fun, the entire debate boiled down to them wanting THEIR names first as default/A records, and "casual" names as CNAMEs.
They didn't actually care what the host saw itself as, just that they didn't have to use the "unprofessional" name when connecting. Apparently ssh'ing to a arbitrary DNS entry that didn't reflect what the host knew itself to be was an illogical incongruity they were willing to live with, as long as they got their way. They didn't even care about the reverse entries.
That was another life lesson learned: Dilbert was right, again! Some people do treat Operating System choices (and DNS naming conventions) like political affiliations. Oh, and it's more important to have sudo privileges on the authoritative name server than on the trusted host(s). ;)
but it's pointless in any organization of any size worth mentioning to be all whimsical with the naming. Eventually it falls apart and makes it a pain in the ass to actually do work. Where is that server? Which datacenter is it? What does it run exactly?
One of my first corporate jobs was right when color lasers were coming out. They were still rare to see.
We had four of them - each named after a season. Then we added a 5th and the whole scheme fell apart. At another company, we used baseball team names. Another place used x-men characters.
After an infinite number of years dealing with that, I was glad to get in on the ground floor at a previous company and do the naming myself.
We did -..domainname.com. At first we did something like "websphere-01.domainname.com" but when we got to 10 servers, it was hard keeping track of which was production and which wasn't. Did we move the dev codebase to that server last week or no? It also fell apart when we stopped running websphere and moved to tomcat.
The "best" (imho) system makes it perfectly clear what the box is used for, where it's located and what environment it is:
prodapp-01.atl.domainname.com
proddb-02.dal.domainname.com
devmail-01.nyc.domainname.com
For networking gear, we stuck with having the gear in the name somewhere since it's not like we would "swap" the hardware and keep the name:
csc2620-01.atl.domainname.com - Cisco 2620 router
hp5308xl-02.nyc.domainname.com - procurve 5308xl Switch (my all time favorite switch - love procurve gear)
acs32-01.dal.domainname.com - Cyclades (now Avocent) 32 port console server
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto...
My university had possibly the most groanworthy naming scheme ever. All servers were named after villages and towns in the surrounding area. The reason? It was a local area network, of course.
Guiness
Moosehead
etc
and the controllers for my SAN are Pony and Keg. :)
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
I was once the admin for a small company with no real IT budget, running a single Novel server that seemed to do something annoying at least once a week. Everyone agreed that it should be named HAL. Unfortunatly, now, I don't have the luxery of having cute, funny, or creative names. I'm currently administrating NS1.domain.com NS2.domain.com WEB_CLUSTER1.domain.com WEB_CLUSTER2.domain.com WEB_CLUSTER3.domain.com DB_CLUSTER1.domain.com DB_CLUSTER2.domain.com MX1.domain.com MX2.domain.com MX3.domain.com mail1.domain.com mail2.domain.com Finance.domain.com NAS1.domain.com NAS2.domain.com production1.domain.com development.domain.com If I ever get replaced, the new guy will know what every server is.
Putting in three new blade chassis for a project that is doomed to failure due to bad architecture and project managements. Their names are Ford, GM and Chrysler.
Who's leg do I have to hump to get a dry martini around here?
When I was in high school I took a co-op class (1995 I think) where I did my work placement at Acadia University. I wrote a manual for some free email software they used at the time.
Anyway when I first started to work there, they gave me the tour, to see where things were and to meet people. I remember two things.
One was their Unix guru, who was a balding guy, with long hair, a great bushy beard, and a tie-died t-shirt if I remember correctly. I remember thinking "hippy".
Anyway the other thing, was they showed me the server room. They had one server that basically basically took up 80% of the room (which was pretty large to begin with). It was like 10 or 12 full sized refrigerators side by side. I was told the name of the server was "Gandalf". The other, which was really its replacement (though Gandalf appeared to still be turned on), was a beige or white box about the size of a small bar fridge. I don't remember if it had a name. I think when I asked why the big one was named "Gandalf", then went and turned off the lights in the server room. It was then you could see the whole place light up with twinkly presumably "magical" lights...
Anyway made an impression, and I still like the name.
My machines are named kernelpanic, lostcluster, segfault, coredump, stackoverflow and Windows.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
I work for the Charleston Newspaper Company and our server cluster is named after the characters in Ocean's Eleven. I am posting the from Reuben.
Naming our embedded "target" machines: Saddam, Fidel, Baghdad, Tripoli, Iran, Iraq
Computers obey me.
I have never liked the idea of putting funny names on severs. Since early on in my career, I have used a naming standard, which seems pretty popular.
It uses a 3 character City code, followed by a 2 character function code, followed by customizable character that can indicate business unit or site within a location or just about anything you wish to define. The final 3 characters are a sequence number which is unique to the City code.
So a general Unix sever in DataCenter1 in London might be LONUX1001
LON - city code
UX - function code for general unix server
1 - Data Center 1
001 - server 1 in London
This system works really well. It can be changed around a bit as needed. The most important thing is that you document your standard and follow it.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
This was going along fine until management noticed a machine named token, which we had to rename lest someone became offended.
Gorak is a much better name for an iPod!!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
All of our machines at work get standardized names. Workstations get XXX-Wyyy-zzzz and servers get XXX-Syyy-zzzz where XXX is the initials of the company, yyy is a site number, and zzzz is a serial number. Any deviation from this scheme is grounds for disciplinary action. Customers think silly names are unprofessional.
...picture (SFW):
http://i43.tinypic.com/25forax.jpg
My machines are named after NES games. We have Paperboy, Kid Icarus, Punchout, Megaman, Metroid, and with a router named Contra and a mail server named IceHockey
I used to have great names for my servers. When I started working for my current employer- most of the servers were named after Star Trek ships. After I took over server management, and because we were running out of names, I started naming servers after Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, usually based on their mythology. (Athena for a security/firewall server, for example.)
The owner of the company got pissed apparently because of the "Pagan" naming scheme (he's apparently "born-again"), and decreed that servers can only be named for their function. So now our email server is named "email", our sales database server is called "sales", Web server is called "web", you get the picture. It didn't matter that the only people who actually dealt with the servers by name on a day-to-day basis were in my IT department. Nice way to kill creativity and create a dull workplace...
Think your company doesn't have any weird machine names? Try this (from inside the firewall).
nslookup
ls -t A yourdomain.com
This will display the whole list. Interesting?
Computers obey me.
I recall someone mentioning at a previous job that there was an announcement about removal of an rdist that had been in use for quite some time. It was called 'prints'.
The memo referred to the rdist formally known as 'prints'... :)
I have not lost my mind... it's backed up on disk somewhere!
I work with a small network now. Used to work for a major bank and they had the Location-OS-Service-sequence number type scheme. It was boring, but useful.
Current network is even more boring, the servers are named based on the order they were purchased. Example, pretend the name of the name of the company is Pine Storage (Its not, neither of those words is in our name). The first server purchased was named Pine. The next server was Pine2. The next Pine3, and so on. It makes it easy to tell how old the network is based on the server names, but doesn't help the users understand the purpose of the server.
I broke the mold when I put up a virtual server for testing. I named it "Casper".
If you administer 200 that is completely and utterly useless.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Why is this just geared towards Unix? At my house I have a Futurama based naming scheme. The old computer is Farnsworth, the beast is named Bender, the powerbook is amywong, and the upcoming EEE will be nibbler.
FreeBSD systems are bird species
Linux systems are rodent species
Windows servers are stereotypically gay fictional characters (sorry, no offense intended)
Oh, and my DMZ hosts are Heineman, Savage and Buster.
I will go and find it for you.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... you don't need to get rid of your foreskin.
As for your head exploding, after all the nonsense you wrote, it may be very beneficial :-P
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Just for starters, in any serious company, you would need another one of each for redundancy purposes.
Depending on your company size you will need 2 or 3 more of each.
And then comes regulation that demands that you have disaster recovery servers in a different location. So multiply each set of servers by 2.
And this is only in your country or region. You have a similar arrangement in each country (poor you) or if you are more lucky, on each region.
And then you have the Development and Q&A servers that mimic your Production set up, and that thus require even more names (perhaps in more than one region).
Sorry, but some of you have no idea how stupid it is to use non structured naming conventions in some environments.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Lets see, the worst names are a tie between types of sharks and Star Trek characters. The sharks were ok but not so easy to spell and didn't lend to any coherence of a theme. I mean, ones like Thresher, Mako and Reef were all obviously sharks but when you got in to Blue, White, Sand, Nurse and so on, it got pretty bad and confusing. These were all SGI systems too and due to an unfortunate circumstance, Blue was an Indigo 2. I thought I was pretty creative when I set up a file server as a depository for returning suites that had been in the field. It never left my lab but it was part of the "shark suite" so I called it Land. Nobody except my manager got the joke.
The Star Trek one was awful because nobody could ever remember how to spell Uhura or Chekov. Hell, I can't even remember how to spell them and one particularly socially maladjusted user pointed out with great exuberance that Chekov was actually spelled wrong and proceeded to harp on the issue for 3 straight years. That is until I had the opportunity to land the Chekov machine on said user's desk. He complained at the irony to his management and asked that we change the name. So I did. To "kirksucks". That caused further outrage. So we had to change it yet again. So it became skywalker and so it was written and so it was done. Stayed that way until that O2 tanked and I used it as a door stop.
The best naming scheme we had was the Muppets! Everybody knew the muppets, even if they weren't a geek and it took us 3 years to run out of names but then we just moved in to other Jim Henson creations like Fraggle Rock, Sesame Street and Dinosaurs.
Took 5 years for management to deem them unprofessional and we had to make a new naming scheme. It ended up being a string of letters and numbers based on the project the user was working on, building they were in and system number. That was by far the worst naming scheme ever and of course management thought of it. Most users were upset at having to type something like "telnet mob137ocs6785" for a client name. It was eventually shortened to mob13785 which was even more confusing because less info was available and it was an inventory taking nightmare.
Yeah, machine naming is a tricky thing.
If you have proper change management policies there is no chance in hell that a computer changing function would keep the same name.
A change of function would start a project, part of which would be to deal with host names in an standardized manner.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... or the piece of paper and you are stuffed. And lets not even get started about how much up to date is the piece of paper.
I have administered machines providing as many as 20 different services at some point. Just by following a good naming convention I knew exactly what machine we were talking about.
No need of fiddly pieces of paper.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Some of this depends on scale. Most of my career I've been the entire IT department, working in places where I had under 10 servers and under 300 machines.
I like whimsical names. I ended up having a bunch of naming schemes.
The SGI irix lab had machines named after birds.
All the secretaries windows machines were named after ancient goddesses.
Servers were named after first magnitude stars. X-stations after fifth magnitude stars.
You are limited as to how much info you can code into a name. In my mind the information lost by using whimsical names is more than made up by having lower error rates typing.
Since these were small shops, most machines had to serve multiple functions. I used the CNAME facility in DNS a lot.
So Vega, the largest server we had, in addition to being the primary file server was also web server, mail server, and dns server. But they were cnamed as sambaprime, nfsprime, www, smtp, pop, and dns respectively.
As we grew large enough to need a separate mail server the new box was made ready, and the the cnames changed.
The big problem with functional names:
1. If a machine has multiple functions, you have to untangle the functions when it outgrows the original list. If a machine is repurposed, you have to either change its name, or risk getting confused. changing it's name makes hardware bookkeeping more interesting.
2. In many cases with lots of machines, you end up with alphabet soup for names. The chances of making a typo when you have a name you can't pronounce, or is 20 characters long is much higher than somYou are limited as to how much info you can code into a name. In my mind the information lost by using whimsical names is more than made up by having lower error rates typing.ething that is short and pronounceable.
3. In a small organization you can associate names with locations, functions, and so on. In a large organization you can eitehr give them functional names (web1,web2) or give them class names, and know that the class associates with a function. (E.g. name all your web servers after spiders)
In any case once you get to thousands of names you aren't going to remember all the associations. (Is Webserver1 the box that runs the shopping cart code) This is what databases are for, and, if you wish what DNS hinfo records are for.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Janet is my new shiny fun laptop, and Michael is an old desktop/ server past his prime. Tito is an even older box that hardly saw any use but never seemed to do anything right. I've also got 2 routers, Whitney and Bobby, but don't get me started on those...
Groucho not Karl.
My computers are named
bella (the original, named after my cat)
hella (a piece of shit)
lella (my laptop)
rella (my windows computer that I access remotely)
della (an old Dell)
We use Lost characters - Hugo, Ben, Kate, etc.
I started at my current company two years ago. They had transformer names. The learning curve was a few months. Some made sense. Postal was the mail server and Rewind was the backup server. But Hound and Mirage were the DNS servers. We now do functional names, mostly for the outside consultants, makes things easier.
I hate ethics, I avoid them on principle.
Most of my servers have a Hunter S. Thompson theme. Lazlo, Gonzo, Mahalo, Lono, Oscar and, of course, Nixon (the outcast)
I worked for a company where the servers were named after counties in the state. One of the admins was setting up a monitoring server to notify him when a server goes down. When he found out there was a Clinton county, his choice for the name was made.
Up until last year my systems were all named after solitaire card games. My home network server was klondike, my own box was pyramid, my mom's box was canfield (earlier, when I still lived with her), and my experimental box was golf. Next name would have been spider.
Sadly klondike gave up the ghost last year so I decided to go to a more practical naming scheme. Working in industry must have corrupted me.
Hey since a (perfunctory, admittedly) search of all the comments so far didn't find another mention of solitaire, I guess I can feel proud of having come up with a fairly unique scheme!
...you don't need to bathe, or cut your fingernails, or brush your teeth, or see the doctor, or take prescription medication....
If flossing your teeth was important, you'd have been born with twine between your fingers!
On evolution alone, our life expectancy is about 35. And a lot of things we evolved over a couple million years are no longer useful after the past couple thousand years of rapid changes.
paintball
Our servers have pretty blase names here, but at least I name my workstations creatively.
Being in networking, my windows boxen are named:
LANshark
LANlord
and the laptop is
LANmine
My Linux boxes all get their names because of Tux, who lives in a cold climate:
Main workstations are:
Igloo
Iceberg
My Laptops are "Icecube" and "Icicle";
Any future personal servers will be named "Glacier"
Hey, we gotta do whatever it takes to remain amused, right?
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Once you have more than 10 or 20 machines under your charge simple names just don't work.
If a new person joins an Admin team you will waste too much time explaining what sleepy, grumpy, and dopey do, in the other hand TXDALDC09DEV01, TXDALDC03DEVDB01, and CASFDC06QADB11 immediately suggest functions, you can refer this person to the document where the disambiguation is in black and white.
Simple rules go a long way. If for example you put the strings prod, cob, dev, qa in your hostnames then you at least have an idea of the importance of the machine (Dev, QA and COB not so important, Prod: I am betting my job in the sucker working as it should).
Try that with "grumpy" in an environment with 200 machines (only your team, we are missing workstations, other teams and other regions) and it quickly becomes obvious that pransksting around with names is not a professional policy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I attended a college with a strong Norwegian background. They used to name their servers Sven, Thor, etc...
I've sort of carried on that tradition at the school I work for now. Our mail server is called Hermes. The other servers (file share) have more boring names so it's easier for staff and students to recognize them.
Except for my iMac G4 ("Luxo"), our other servers are named: Brian, Stewie, Lois, Cartman, Bebe, Wendy, Kyle, and Stan.
If you change a machine's function you should have a process in place to do it properly. That would include to deal properly with host names.
Ditto goes for physical relocation (why do you need to relocate a machine? Build a new one in the new location and point the clients to that new machine). If you relocate a machine you have a process in place, part of which deals with host names.
These are not accidental tasks folks, these are regular tasks that should not catch anybody by surprise, if you don't have procedures for these tasks it is high time you should start to write them down...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In my group we name our servers after birds... egret, hawk, osprey, falcon... my primary production server is shikra.. it's a pretty fun naming scheme and the source dataset is quite large!
Have you heard of these technologies?
They are awesome.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The nice thing about Greco-Roman mythology is that there are a lot of gods, and they have personalities and attributes that can work sometimes.
So in our house....
BSD mail/web/external server -> zeus
Mac Pro -> achilles
iMac -> morpheus (yes, it was called that before The Matrix came out. The god of sleep and dreams, because that machine had an alarm clock on it)
MacBook Pro -> minerva (goddess of wisdom, commerce and music)
Mac mini -> bacchus (god of entertainment, more or less - this one is in the living room hooked up to the TV).
Macbook Air -> cupid (belongs to the wife)
OK, we had 16 of them, and that was in one locality only.
We had 4 different localities. Do the maths.
The naming standard was pretty simple, it was
nis
so parnisprod01 was a host based in Paris, providing NIS+ service in our Production environment and was the first of 4 of them.
That way parnisdev04 or oslnisqa03 become self explanatory.
In a case like yours the master server could be nismaster (there can be only one master) and nisslave01. Simple, self explanatory and meaningful.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
OK, we had 16 of them, and that was in one locality only.
We had 4 different localities. Do the maths.
The naming standard was pretty simple, it was
location service role number
so parftpprod01 was a host based in Paris, providing FTP service in our Production environment and was the first of 4 of them.
That way pardnsdev04 or oslhttpqa03 become self explanatory.
In a case like yours the master server could be nismaster (there can be only one master) and nisslave01. Simple, self explanatory and meaningful.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Use functional names: they are scalable.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have worked in several large operations and a system along the lines you mention is the only sensible way to do it.
All the chaps whining about relocation or renaming of machines most likely work in operations with lax change management policies with relatively few ( 200 ) machines.
In my last gig we had 500 *desktops* running some flavour or another of UNIX or UNIX like OS's, forget about the servers....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...Laverne & Shirley characters. 10 years later, their server is still named "Squiggy".
If yes, what is the problem with renaming?
If not? Why not!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That RFC was written in 1990.
Back then the idea of a company with datacentres all around the world, each of them with hundreds or even thousands of machines, was a distant dream.
Back then you expected to have one or two mainframes, a few minicomputers, a few dozens of PCs (at best) and lots of dumb terminals.
That world has passed, the RFC seems dated in places (it still may work for small concerns, but the advice clearly does not scale).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
When I started my own company on the side, I bought two servers and installed some virtual machines on them. I figured I'd use the NATO alphabet and when I ran out of letters, I'd think of something else.
Of course after three years I was still at 'delta'.
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We use service based names and numbers. But I would love to switch to more fun names if for the only reason when we purchased ns3 to replace ns2, ns2 remained online for another year doing other duties before its end of life leaving me with ns1, ns3 and ns4. Names like this exist all over my workplace and renaming servers affects to many other things. But if I installed sleepy and threw away grumpy a year later the names still all look fine. The obsessive compulsive hates missing numbers in a series.
My typical job involves wading into an unholy cluster.... with people screaming and yelling about why the whole network is down. I'd love to tell them "Our communication will be through email only," but they'd get even more upset. :-)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
For my personal machines I've long used the last names of my favorite authors: Eco, Calvino, Borges, Pavic....
At a startup we used names drawn from Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' to name practically everything. Unfortunately, I think that only really made sense to me. Servers were named after rivers (Anduin, Rauros, ...), the wireless GWs after wizards (Gandalf, Ragadast). The biggest problem I had was that most of the names were too unfamiliar to the rest of the office for them to remember or spell correctly.
jbgreer
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th Ed., Vol 2
With IPv4 in a known subnet (especially with crappy numeric names) it can be easier to remember the IP (3 digits to remember).
If IPv6 ever comes in proper naming will be key.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
My home server is called Jose, just because I don't know anyone named Jose. My old PC was Lando. Laptop: MaxximumLazer.
If I could rearrange the keyboard, I'd put U and I together.
I've only ever been in charge of naming my home machines, but I've been through a couple of schemes. For a while, it was names of the homes of various pantheons ("Olympus", "Valhalla", etc). Then for a while I was down to just one machine - Valhalla. As new machines showed up, Valhalla became a file server, and the individual machines became Norse gods: my wife's machine was Frigg, and we also had Baldur, Njord, etc. There have been a couple of Loki's, which for some reason I've always reserved for small devices (once a laptop, now my iPhone).
...mythology, in our case it started with nordic but we are now advancing to roman and greek. Heimdahl beeing the gatekeeper is the firewall and Kraken is of course the proxy server (running squid).
Upper management does not care about server names, that is not their job. Middle bosses do however care about server names and they usually like "intelligent" and "descriptive" names, like V-CTX-01 for the first Virtual CiTriX server.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DangerMouse#Characters
All my servers have mythological names like hermes, hercules and perseus. Then I use CNAME records to signify purposes; login, www, mx, pop, smtp, ns etc.
Been using this scheme for 10 years now, moved twice, reinstalled, upgraded and restructured several times. No confusion EVER.
My users? Blissfully unaware of the various changes.
3 Days later I get an alert to my phone at 2am to tell me Nelson is not responding to ping. WTF is Nelson?
I can top that. Imagine being rung at a groggy 3AM by a chap (with an impeccable upperclass English accent) who tells you, in all seriousness, that Elvis is dead and could you do something about it please?
When you recover, try and convince the insistent non-technical gentleman that you have never heard of Elvis and maybe he has the wrong hotline.
If I ever find out who named that system...
One Data Center I worked at we named all of our Servers after parts of the Mind. Another Data Center for a Liberal Arts University we named all our servers after aspects of Eastern Religions. An ISP/WebHost I worked for once had names of varieties of Sharks for their Server Names.
I now work for a company that has Server Farms across 4 Data Centers worldwide. We name all of our Servers after Historic Bomb Names. We distinguish what Data Center a Server is in by the nationality. Servers with a Historic US Bomb Names are in the Texas Data Center, those with UK Bomb Names are in the London Data Center, etc. It doesn't really make the SysAdmins' jobs any easier necessarily, but the Users get it and grep it and that's the important part.
At home, all of my computers since the early '80's have been named after Harlots from Ancient History and Mythology, chosen appropriately for their function (i.e. Cacophony, the ancient Greek Siren, is what I named my HTPC).
We do it because it works. It's that simple. Move along, nothing to see.
(names are easy to remember, names within the same context even better due to association, blabla. You can probably make a study on it, but why? when it's all dead-obvious to anyone with half a working brain???)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I worked in an organisation where we named our servers after Marx brothers. When we ran out of Harpo, Zeppo, Chico and Groucho we added Karl, skid, birth, stretch and Deutsch. Then we changed to something more sensible.
Our network admin here likes to use cute anime character names for his servers. Problem is, he put up several linux compute servers that users need to ssh into. Our American users had a lot of trouble remembering how to spell the Japanese anime names, so we requested he use CNAMEs to make it easier for the users. So his typical user-friendly response was to come up with the aliases 'lnxcmpsvr1', 'lnxcmpsvr2', etc. Guess how many times the users fat fingered those names? Ironically he's a notoriously bad speller so he goofs up on them all the time too.
Here I just have one, which is FrankCompStein, mostly because I made it out of random parts I found in other people's computers.
God Lord Jesus Christ Allah, etc...
if the old nas1 is being re-purposed as a mail server you change its name and let DNS tell everybody that the IP address that used to be named nas1 is now named mx2 (or whatever old/new server name pair reflects the old/new use of the server). back when you had to update the hostname files on a bunch of machines there was more incentive to avoid changing the hostnameIP address associations, but those days are loooong gone.
Who was busy all day working on Uranus? :P
At our site the admin who sets the box up picks the name and we each have a theme. Mine are Trillian, Marvin, Ford, Agrajag, Dent, and Dirk. Our sun boxes are Robbie, Chip, and Ernie.
My computers at home and at work are named after bands of Mike Patton. I kind of like it when bluetooth some times shows "MrBungle" :)
telax - Just another vim and c hacker.
I'm renaming all my machines Obama
I lost good money betting on who'd win at Dien Bien Phu
Just finished watching Battlefield Vietnam from ed2k
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
No one that does anything in a high volume uses a cute naming scheme. You base it off rack, tile, rack elevation ect. You then map in DNS. There is a great paper from MS on large scale data center deployments. Its stupid to name your machines after transformers or anything else at scale.
My company names our servers based on mythical creatures that best describe the amount of pain we would experience if that server went down. The only thing that sucks is learning how to spell 'Xo_Ti_mi-go'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elements_of_the_Cthulhu_Mythos
The names we have for our windows servers shouldnt be printed.... wait, we dont run any windows servers :)
programmer (noun): A multi-cellular organism that converts caffeine into code (see also 'geek')
Back in the 90's we did just this, servers of a type were named after rivers and streams in upstate NY like Hudson, Esopus, etc. Project groups usually had their own theme, which helped identify the purpose of a machine.
At that time I was mostly doing administration, and had to install a set of new Sun desktops and a group file server for a group headed by a difficult manager. I asked him what he wanted for a theme, and was told "That's your job, if you can't do it I'll ask for someone competent."
The next morning the group was in, body fluids, blood, sweat and tears, vomit, mucus, drool, and their fileserver plasma.
My manager asked me to provide new names when he stopped laughing, and rejected my next theme of social diseases, saying it was "only funny once."
procyon -- current desktop /.), will not go into soft-off/S5---it actually reboots instead, which is weird
renard -- former desktop, currently doing F@H, misc. server work (I took the suggestion from someone here at
mephitis -- old laptop (inoperable due to loose power jack)
fennec -- wireless router
lepus-crassus -- big, old clunker of a laptop my mother uses for Web and e-mail. That, and I think I had a certain stale meme on my mind at the time.
I have one name that pre-dates this motif: sanctuary, an old Pentium 2. I think I should rename it sloth. I have a machine that's nearly as good as procyon, integrated graphics notwithstanding, and I built it from mostly spare parts, so I'm just trying to figure out something appropriate for it. My new netbook (an Acer Aspire One) will have to wait until I get Slackware onto it before it gets a name better than localhost.
And I'd love the chance to take over my sister's old computer; it can be jumbo for its lack of memory (Wikipedia's list of famous elephants makes me sad).
I used to administer a pair of Macintosh file servers running the "Classic" Mac OS that would crap out on me pretty regularly. I ended up naming them Fat Man and Little Boy.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Coke, classic, sprite, cherrycoke, dietcoke, caffeinefree, mrpib...
Functions change. Disks change. RAM changes. But you can understand a-2ghz,b-3ghz...
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
My computer is named "Unknown" so it shows up well on wifi.....
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
aye.example.com
hade.example.com
mye.example.com
bose.example.com
Don't name your servers after food items. If it's 2AM and you're running an all-nighter and there's nothing and nowhere to get food from, and you just managed to distract yourself from food enough, the last thing you want is ssh pizza.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The UNIX boxes when I was there were named after dead U.S. Presidents like Grant, Polk, and several others. Either this was a different group of UNIX boxes or JPM decided to change role models. Based on my experience there, they should have named them Cutthroat, Backstabber, Liar, ValueSharesArentWorthACrap, etc. On second thought, Cutthroat1, Cutthroat2, ... , Backstabber39, Backstabber40, ... would be better.
If you don't know CNAMEs, you probably shouldn't have been hired to manage the network since it's a big part of how things work there. Just like you shouldn't have been hired if they used NIS and you didn't know that. Or WINS. Or whatever. Maybe that's not your fault; I doubt the people hiring you might know that.
But if you're frankly too damned uninformed to try nslookup or even just try pinging or remote logging into the frakkin' machine, maybe you shouldn't have lied on your resume and your experience managing systems and should go back to working at Kinkos.
So...when apache spits back a 500 error with the hostname 'iamafag.yourcompany.com' how are you supposed to figure out what the server does? How do you immediately know (without having to grep through BIND--God help you if you're on Windows) that the *major* use of the server is a CNAME billing.yourcompany.com?
I totally understand how CNAMEs should work--give the host a reasonable name--like web1.mycompany.com, then you have CNAMES pointing to it like billing, signup, bought-out-competitor.com, etc...
There's no place like
we can't name servers by location because gandalflon in london could easily get a partner in paris as gandalfpar. And everyone knows that the london crew talking about their webserver simply says gandalf. What happens if the paris server has to be interfaced? Discussions can end up quite confusing. As by usage the location part is anyway not used, why not do it the right way with gandalf.lon.domain.co.uk and gandalf.par.domain.co.uk?
That looks like a good scheme, but wait, for each local branch it's again fantasy names.
finer location? Like room number and rack? There is no need for remote people to know this information (security). So, just numbering them? Like production118, where 118 is the last byte of the IP address (just to show how pointless the DNS then becomes). Or aliases for external? Still the location-name would be visible in syslog messages.
Functional: this is only practical for aliases. The server itself usually goes through 3-4 reincarnations. The info that gandalf is now the test system and no more the main webserver is assimilated quite fast by the people who work with it daily. The others should just use the alias. And if it's an SSL server the aliasing even becomes more important.
And what is gandalf then used for? Well you have asset management for this! There you can find anything from number of CPUs to assumed function. If the information is only available there, people also tend to keep it up to date. Even the company cars are in there. And I don't remember seeing stickers on the cars like companyCEO2car004LON.
"You're now connected to your mother"
"Click here to start exchanging files with a rock"
"Connection to a pedestrian was dropped"
can't get much better than this, imho