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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 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
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...
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"
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!
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/
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
(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.
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".
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.
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...
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
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.
...was named "Debbie"
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.
Thus, if you tether your Motorola cell phone to your laptop, you end up with Ockham's RAZR.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."