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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". :-)
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 /.!
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.
...but I later decided on naming them after AIs.
Roker?
Jolsen?
Sharpton?
Yankovic?
Gore?
Oh, wait...
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?
...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.
We had a Simpsons fan where I used to work, When our engineering groups got our first workstations, he named his 'homer' and suggested that we follow suit. We named ours 'ulysses'.
Have gnu, will travel.
...was named "Debbie"
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' ;)
Thus, if you tether your Motorola cell phone to your laptop, you end up with Ockham's RAZR.
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.
So that'd be virtual machines, then?
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
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.
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.