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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.
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 /.!
...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".
I name all my Unix servers after famous eunuchs.
Well, not sure about where you are, but around here, adnauseum is the mail server.
Nothing says 'welcome to the neighborhood' like a gunny sack full of dead squirrels.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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)
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.
...but I later decided on naming them after AIs.
Roker?
Jolsen?
Sharpton?
Yankovic?
Gore?
Oh, wait...
"Unable to connect to database server"
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
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"
It gives your customers something to chuckle over during traceroutes too. Why settle for letting them discover they traversed v11s0p1.dal01.blahblahblah.net, when you could let them know that they went through thebeast.bbb.net or ratbastard.wehateourjobs.com?
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
...and period3 means that you're 12 years old and just started puberty?
-- Cheers!
"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
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
No, natural blondes that have dyed their hair.
If obscurity is not a chief objective you could latinize the server's functions. Mailicus, Proxius, Validicus etc..
Add in some major/minor modifiers and you are in business.
Yes, I name my servers after mythological beings, too.
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.
What is this "females" of which you speak?
brandelf -t FreeBSD
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.
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".
...and logically, Cats 5 and 6 would be very similar in appearance, but Cat 6 would end up able to chase mice ten times faster.
Power outage or it's not true!
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...
...was named "Debbie"
You'll get less complaints from the users... Nothing like calling the helpdesk because you're having a problem with gonorrhea...
A little extra work for us, but we have ways internally of handling this issue without much headache.
If your going for obscurity I'd go the other way... give some old pentium 1 with a copy of tradewars2000 in a closet the name 'auth-pay-master', and the your main server something like 'help-desk-print-server' ;)
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.
I rue the day a colorblind co-worker unwittingly annihilates your production server. :)
I named all of mine George
Make America grate again!
Thus, if you tether your Motorola cell phone to your laptop, you end up with Ockham's RAZR.
Happed to one of my colleagues... He was reading reddit when he blueit.
Naming the server "Hezbollah" and having a bunch of cnames point to it ensures you can easily move a service at any later time without having to rename the server.
Right. It also means that if there's a horrible disk crash, the FBI and NSA no doubt have several nice backup copies from last Friday you can borrow.
Personally, I prefer to name my servers after women I have been...involved...with. This easily covers hundreds of systems.
Palm trees and 8
So that'd be virtual machines, then?
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Don't forget the most important part: the host part of the IP address should be the element's atomic number (e.g., "Einsteinium" -> 192.168.0.99).
Even better, you could Pig-Latinise them. Ailmay, Oxypray, Alidatorvay, and (my favourite) Irewallfay!
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
If your wii is yuki, you might want to see a doctor!
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.
And perhaps because of a certain background process you keep running in the background?
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.
The phonetic alphabet can be a great time server... "Ok you need to find the server tawks in the rack. that is T-A-W-K-S as in Tsunami Are Why Knot Sea."
My home servers (that live in data centers?) are called things on a "0" theme. Knot, Naught, Not, Knotty, 0.
For work I'm thinking about pc### where ### is the phone extension and dhcp will hand out 192.186.1.177 to the person at extension 177. It should make it easier to locate problem machines.
First server was nobody, followed by righty, lefty, and fleshlight.
Next up is fido.
What? I just need an echomail gateway.
paintball
You can name servers? And here I was memorizing IPs ...
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
The previous story links to a previous story too.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
I'd argue with you because it seems like you are arguing, but I can't really pinpoint your thesis. However, if I could figure out your argument, rest assured, I'd prove you categorically mistaken.
Just callin' it like I see it.
mod this one up!
I remember the first computer I networked I changed so it showed up as H3110 (Hello) ... since they insisted on numbers.
H3110 is a number? I think that the numbers end at F.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Chop the whole thing off and I'm sure you could get even more of a reduction.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Something along that line happened to an ex customer of mine. They hired a security consultant firm to have their network checked. When the consultants finally came back with their report, they stated that the network was absolutely secure and that they had been unable to get access to any machine from the outside. The report also stated what actions they had taken: They had looked up DNS information for the customer's domain name, found an entry "firewall", and from there on tried for various days to hack into it. Needless to say that the "firewall" entry was a leftover from who knows when and pointed to an unused IP address.
Although it may be healthy to project personalities onto things (I'm a little skeptical, though I could maybe be persuaded by somebody who doesn't go around making sweeping psychiatric diagnoses of people he's never met) that hardly justifies encoding those projections into names.
My printer wastes my time, money, and annoys the hell out of me without ever really doing any work - so I named it after my ex-girlfriend.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
We kinda do the same thing, our servers are named form the solar system. mars, jupiter, saturn, mercury . moons too: phobos etc ... There easy names to remember, and a good scheme ... Too bad we couldnt use starwars themes ... The death star is down, reboot!
Go go Gadget Nailgun!
Here at the (anonymous) clinic we give our servers the name of disorders and conditions.
Guess which server had RAM problems?
Emphysema suddenly shutdown one day when its fan locked-up and overheated.
All MS servers have names of various cancers. Macabre yes, but it keeps them from spreading.
Our IT staff sounds quite impressive to the MDs when they're chatting in the cafeteria.
Psychoanalyze that!
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Incidentally, my ex-girlfriend's name was Lexmark, so it all works out!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)