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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?
functional naming.
Machines need arbitrary names, functional names are aliases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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! --
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
(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.
We never use standard names, our company deals with lots of e-payments and the idea is that the less obvious our naming scheme is, the more difficult it is for hacker to really figure out what the purpose of a server is and what it may store.
A little extra work for us, but we have ways internally of handling this issue without much headache.
See, I don't get it. WHY would you name your servers this? If you smack your head or have a hard night drinking, would you know FOR SURE that ServerX is the file server or the database server? Would you code like that? At least make the names useful.
Personally, I like MrDomainController, MrNameServer, MrFileServer, etc. Have a backup? Meet MsDomainController. Need yet another backup? JrDomainController? Need another one? No you don't. See, easy, unambiguous, useful.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Well I think the reason for having a bunch of "Cute" names for the server is just really prevent confusion.
Oh Crap Medusa is down. vs. WebServer014 is down. We tend to relate better with recognizable names, so it creates a spot in the persons memory of all the systems, vs boring names where they will just become mixed in the fray.
In college over a decade ago, we had Greek Mythogy Names. And I still know what system is which by the name.
Morpheous and Ultra Sparc was the main file/web server
Zeus a 2 CPU ultra Sparc e250 was the remotelogin ssh/telnet server where the CS students did their work.
Then we had Valhalla and Pandora the Ultra Sparc 1 workstations...
It is actually quite effective memory tool. for the NT workstations we just had NT1 NT2.... I can't remember what order they were in or which one was different then the other.
Those names actually made administration much easier.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
This is why my mail server is 192.168.1.25 and the web server is 192.168.1.80, etc. Dev web server is 192.168.1.81. At least you can guess by the IP what it's about, based on that scheme.
Oh and their names?
Moiraine
Berelain
etc...
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.