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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 /.!
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
Naming our machines in odd and amusing ways it our way of secretly rebelling against over management.
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
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.
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.
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? ;--)
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.
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...
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
"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.
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"
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
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
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.
...and period3 means that you're 12 years old and just started puberty?
-- Cheers!
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
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... ;-)
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.
(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.
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.
And for the same reason that we name the variable total_annual_cost instead of c113, it helps to have a human-readable/remember-able name for the server instead of a collection of gibberish which, though it may translate eventually into some useful information, is so hard to remember that it takes longer than just looking it up on the chart of server names on the wall. The names must be arbitrary because the server must be able to be repurposed, but the names must be consistent or they do not offer any mnemonic assistance.
We name servers for one group out of one arbitrary category (say mythical monsters) and servers for another group out of another (say SF authors). This allows the name to communicate some information directly (info which is unlikely to change even if the server's role is changed within that group). While all other information can quickly be found on the wiki or a printed out chart, which actually happens faster than deciphering that at13g3d12 is the 12th dev server for group 3 in the at&t datacenter rack 13. (It really is faster to look it up than to decode even that simple of an encoded name.) Finally, for an individual dev working on several projects it is much easier to remember that the billing project is on mothra while the reporting project is on grendel than it is to remember that one is on at13g3d3 and one is on at13g3d4.
My company actually switched from an arbitrary but consistent naming convention to a strictly encoded naming convention and quickly switched back when the loss of efficiency and productivity was actually measurable.
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".
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.
By your logic, I can name all the variables in my code "x", "y", and "z" and then complain that they've hired *idiots* who can't remember that "x means the number of items in the shopping cart, duh". I could claim it's just a rite of passage into the world of complex software development...
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".
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."
Depends. Functional naming conventions often try to name servers according to some crazy attempt to fully qualify the server name. It'd be like naming your variables like I have seen in some VB programs (stupid Hungarian notation!)
I have worked in places where servers are given functional names, and places where servers are named in a more whimsical fashion. Functional names suck.
Even "meaningful" names lose meaning over time, due to changes in naming conventions, repurposing of hardware, or other unforeseen things. Might as well give them whimsical names which relate to one another, yet aren't dependent on the implementation details. Servers are named for human reference, else they'd be IP addresses.
Then, a new director or new group handles server allocation. The naming convention changes and you have to remember yet another arcane naming system.
Again, functional names are cumbersome and hard to remember. And you often have to type server names over and over again. It's easier to remember names like sleepy, grumpy, and dopey than to remember and constantly retype TXDALDC09DEV01, TXDALDC03DEVDB01, and CASFDC06QADB11.
If you just hate whimsical names, then at least serialize the server names. Server01, Server02, and Server03 is a better way to go than coming up with some complex system of fully qualified names.
blah blah blah
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...
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.
Skynet
> It's a really bad sign when your naming scheme is less user-friendly than IP addresses
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.
...was named "Debbie"
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.
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.
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.
I named all of mine George
Make America grate again!
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
Not to feed a troll, but ...
"Tolerance" is about freedom of choice -- until that choice begins harming others against their will. Most genital mutilation is done before a child even learns to speak, never mind before the child is mature enough to make the decision in the first place. Calling circumcision and other kinds of genital mutilation a "religious freedom" is nothing short of barbaric.
My parents loved me enough to allow me to make the choice whether to keep my foreskin. Yeah, I'm not getting rid of it anytime soon.
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
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+
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
That actually seems a rational solution. Nothing like hours of discomfort to convince you the whole plan is a seriously bad idea.
Soap and water?
We could also cure breast cancer by performing preemptive mastectomies.
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.
All the medical evidence is that circumcision does nothing of the sort. Every time there's new thing, like AIDS, claims are made that circumcision prevents it and it is always proven false. It is a mutilation to reduce sexual pleasure and has no other purpose. That female circumcision is worse is meaningless. But don't let the piles of medical evidence cloud your reality.
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
Actually, the "piles of medical evidince" have lead the American Association of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association not to recommend routine circumcision of newborns. Given the number and density of nerve endings in the foreskin, comparison to clitoridectomy is not so far-fetched. Just because the one is socially accepted where you live doesn't make it any less barbaric than the other.
The previous story links to a previous story too.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Here's an analogy... it's like they altered your eyes to make you see in black and white; and someone says you could have a "more intense" vision. Not ever knowing color, you can only imagine that as increased brightness. And you think, no, I don't need more brightness.
But it's not just more of what you know. It's something you don't know at all.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Heaven forbid little boys would pull back their foreskin and rub it with a sponge. They may enjoy it.
19 cross-sectional studies, 5 case-control studies, 3 cohort studies, and 1 partner study showed that the relative risk for HIV infection was 44% lower in circumcised men. Where's your evidence?
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.
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."
Incorrect.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I don't call myself a 'linguaphile', snowgirl, I just quietly go through life with a PhD in linguistics. Also, your quote there has no bearing on anything. At all.