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Suitable Naming Conventions For Workstations?
spectre_240sx writes "We've discussed server naming a fair amount in the past, but I haven't seen much about workstations. Where I currently work, we embed a lot of information in our workstation names: site, warranty end date, machine type, etc. I'm of the opinion that this is too much information to overload in the machine name when it can more suitably be stored in the computer description. I'd love to hear how others are naming their workstations and some pros and cons for different naming schemes. Should computers be logically tied to the person that they're currently assigned to, or does that just cause unnecessary work when a machine changes hands? Do the management tools in use make a difference in how workstations are named?"
And that's saying something.
Honestly, can you even think of a stupider question? How is this even an issue? Just name each machine with an ID and put the information in a spreadsheet somewhere. It's not a complicated problem.
Name them after Star Trek ships, races, planets and character names. You are obviously not a true CIS geek.
Better known as 318230.
A computer name should not be a database. If you want to store information such as site, warranty end date, machine type, ... use a database.
Asset tags systems work well for this. It's what we use. Easy for RA requests too..just ask the user to read their asset tag number (if you don't have it memorized because it's the 5,689th time this dumbfuck has called you asking how to move a file from one folder to another.) and you can punch it in and connect.
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He insisted that all names came from Alice in Wonderland. Very annoying. And not practical.
i.e. gla-hub-04a-001
or here's a off the wall idea...
Number them as: City(or location)+machines static IP address within the internal network.
i.e. Glasgow-10-10-11-124
simples....
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
My first workstation was named tangent (after myself!)
My second workstation was named sine, followed by cosine, secant, cosecant and cotangent.
I got stuck for a while before I decided to go with arctangent, arcsine, etc but that didn't last
So out came hyperbolictangent... and I promptly gave up and now I name them after hot young female movie stars.
Morale of the story: Make sure your naming convention has room for expansion.
I'm not a fan of crazy overloading(the name has to be unique in any case and I'd rather do a lookup if I really need the warranty details, rather than stare a nasty truncated version of them in the face every day); but what works best really depends on how computers are used in your organization.
For instance, if you have laptops, individually assigned to employees, and relatively low turnover, a name that tells you about the machine's primary user is really handy. It allows you to instantly associate the voice on the other end of the phone, or the name on the trouble ticket, with the machine in question.
If you have desktops, location based naming might be more useful, particularly if users move around, are replaced frequently, or share hardware per shift or something.
It's hard to give general rules for naming because, in essence, a name should capture(as succinctly as possible) the salient characteristics that make something unique. Exactly what those characteristics are depends heavily on how your organization is set up.
People move, machines get re-allocated, rebuilt, etc.
I use the service tag. Why? Several reasons:
Stuff like "bob-pc" or "accounts1" does not scale and either becomes inconsistent, or you need to keep renaming PCs which presents other issues (fucks up any configuration databases you have, etc).
So, service tag - boring as fuck, but does the job.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
...but I'm a big fan of giving machines actual names, after TV shows, bands, movies, fiction, etc. I prefer to log into "Trixie.mycompany.com" instead of "LAUX001"; the former, in addition to being easier to remember, just gives the machine a trifle bit of "personality". Yes, I realize that the latter may convey more information (mail servers especially seem to do this: "CHIMAIL01", "NYCEXCH05", etc.), but it feels cold and impersonal; if you treat your machines as just machines, as just any old random tool you'd grab and work with, then they become just a series of interchangeable parts. Giving a machine a name invokes something, typically whimsical, that just adds a touch of humanity back into the system. Yes it's still a machine, yes it's going to spit out a thousand nonsensical errors when you forget a semicolon somewhere in your C++ file, and yes it will eventually be replaced, but for that period of time when you're working with it, you're just that little bit more connected to something more ... personal.
Maybe this is just old school thinking; it seems like this was much more common back when everyone had an account on the campus Unix boxen, complete with subtle importance ("Oh, you have an account on Kramden? That's a much faster Vax than Norton...what project are you working on that you scored that??").
imagine the horror of walking into a lab where all the workstations are named OMG-David-Caruso-01, ...
OMG-David-Caruso-02,
*shudders*
...after all the boring low power beige posters who think your question sucks.
You can use my name for the zooty new multi-core with the blue leds.
Exactly. We have an 'asset tag' - a number written on the case with a sharpie. (Works perfectly fine for us!) The computer's name is just "PC" followed by the (zero padded to three digits) computer number. Thus, I'm on PC079.
(With us, when a person changes department or office, their computer follows them. Thus there's no sane reason for us to encode the office or department name into the computer's name.)
Keep it simple. I work at a college, and what we do for desktops is, we name them after location, room, number of workstation. So if the workstation is at our aviation campus in room Y109 and it's the 3rd workstation, it would be AVY10903 (AV-Aviation, Y109-Room, 03-3rd workstation) Laptops, we tie to users, we give it the users login name as the laptops name. We find this easy so when we have staff/faculty turn over, we are not running to workstations to rename them, and if its a laptop user that is being replaced, the laptop is returned to IT and we get it ready for the next user. This may or may not work for you, but it works for me.
We used to name our machines after Lovecraftian deities but some of the sysadmins got grumpy when they couldn't pronounce the name >
Use asset tags. They are unique (at least should be) all other data are stored in database else where, sub-records keeping rest of the information like software loaded, key#, ...
*IF* BIG IF,you have more than 1 company under the same roof, add a simple company id, but really not needed, that is really a column in database.
Watch out for asset tags greater than 8 or 10 characters, depending. Can be problem with secondary machines and naming issues, like workstation ids IBM equipment (10 char unique / 8 char local machine plus 2 auto-assigned characters to insure uniqueness). This way tracking a machine "foot print" on a foreign location machine will be easier, instead of random assigned ids.
The machine should be reimaged when it changes hands, so resetting the name will add about 5 seconds to the setup process. Not a big deal.
Just for reference: RFC 1178
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html
While it is not a direct answer to your question, it does give a lot of good why and why not's on this subject. Just as handy now as in the 90s.
That's close to our system. We use adult toy names. It's pretty good, but you have to be careful not to use something obvious like "vibrator".
Arab, Bead, Tickler, Butterfly, MagicWand, Swing, Clamp, JackRabbit, etc... no one's caught on yet.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
In the tightest companies I have worked for, they name workstations and servers with meaningless random generated alphanumeric sequences.
I guess they consider it more secure, making it harder to figure out the network topology. Also, since the names are meaningless, there is never a need to rename the machine really, unless they would want to confuse even more want to be hackers.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
This is my computer Darrel, and this is my other computer Darrel.
XML causes global warming.
I named the computer lab's windows 98 box (for legacy software) "Kathleen Fent" since it's dirty, it's got viruses, and it goes down several times a day.
Place I worked at previously had an even much simpler method: the hostname is the cubicle number followed by the image build number.
It made a lot of physical services such as repairs and upgrades much faster and really, there is just too much information about a user and machine to even consider using the hostname to store it all.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Always consult a standard. For instance, ISO 10992a states that a machine name should be constructed by combining the name, age, sex, and favorite sexual position of each user on the computer, combining into a Unicode string, and taking the md5 checksum of said Unicode string. The resulting hex string shall be used as the workstation name. In the event of a collision, the sexual position of every user shall be replaced by their next favorite position until the collision is resolved.
My old university/job used a three letter department code, and then the last six digits of the asset tag. You'd get systems like ITS-26301 and MTH-31415.
This is pretty solid, especially because:
Your mileage may vary.
One word: TinyURL.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's a lot of work when someone changes a cubicle.
I see nothing wrong with naming a computer by function. If the function is being reassigned, the OS itself is probably being reinstalled as well, so you still have to manually name the machine again anyways... so nothing is lost by giving it a new name at that time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Every engineering cluster had a theme. That meant that you knew what lab the machine was in but it still kept the names interesting. It also made it easy to remember that the dolts who killed remote jobs always used the NBA team machines because their prof told them to use that lab and how to kill processes.
The best theme? Rain, Snow, Hail, Leaf, Meteor, Skylab, etc. "Things that fall from the sky."
A name needs to be recognizable by humans. Because inevitably someone is going to want to share some files and it's a whole lot easier if you can type in a normal name instead of mistaking RS34598 with RS34589. Granted, the user's name isn't good, because machines change hands all the time (without telling the busy bodies at IT about it). Cube numbers don't work, since a lot of machines are lab machines, or may turn into lab machines.
There really isn't a good way. Would be nice to have two names, a permanent one, assigned early on, probably related to an asset ID, and a nickname based on the user or purpose of the machine. The nickname can be changed anytime the user or department wants to do so. Except that this may be a pain to do on some operating systems.
I've found that if it isn't automatic it gets forgotten.
Three years later you'll have WRKSTN_ROOM423 in room 132 and the admin or user that moved it will have either forgot completely or moved on.
Workstations should not need to be accessed over the network so they should not need a friendly name.
There is no reason why the tag number which is clearly printed on the machine should not be used.
You have to rename it.
Which is silly.
As with people, machines should have a unique name, all the rest of the information about the machine should be in a database of some kind (a list in a text file would do).
Then when you move the machine, assuming that your DHCP, DNS and WIntel servers are up to scratch, yo have to do precious little but relocate the machine (and update your database).
With your naming scheme you have to rename the machine in addition to updating any database you may have.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It is a common mistake, but do not attempt to insert descriptions into identifiers. You wouldn't name your child "Dribble-gums-nursery-2" and expect then to be still comfortable about it when they reach their teens. But call then something meaningless like "Kevin" and there's no problem. Computers are no different.
If you create an identifier that attempts to describe the computer, rather than just give it a unique name, you can be sure that by the time it comes to decommissioning it the identifier will be misleading. Things will have changed. It will have a different location, a different OS, a different owner, or a different spec.
Plenty of name generators on the web, such as http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. I quite like the dwarf names such as Bloodbreaker, Demonbreaker, Doomsmelter, Foesmiter, Greatmail, Honorpick, Irondig, Ironsmasher, Lightpacer, Stonebullion. One serious advantage of generated names is that they are pronouncable, making help desk support easier. Unlike some alphanumeric codes - I still remember the confusions when IBM had two RS/6000 family members, the 380 and the 3AT.
Andrew Yeomans
(for lab computers) ... vertex60. pixel01, synapse01, glyph01.
Pick something computing/science/maths-sounding. Name all computers of the same type with that, plus a number: vertex01, vertex02,
It's not as boring as "asset1241", but it's a *lot* easier to find numbered PCs in the lab. It's also easier for anyone wanting to use a machine remotely. Finding your usual glyph12 is running slow? Well, you know at least 11 other machine names.
Staff/research students could name their own PCs, presumably because it's a lot easier to find one PC out of just three in an office.
Servers were named after birds, supercomputers after (IIRC) greek gods, and the authentication servers after nuclear accidents ("there's a problem with three-mile-island, so I've changed the DNS to point to tokaimura")
First genuine LOL of the day. Thank you !
Squirrel!
because if you're going to rename a server, you might as well rebuild it
What, "hostname $new_name" is too hard to type? I mean, you don't hardcode the machine name in application config files and rc scripts, do you?
Do you?
For the sake of making things easier on our SMS admins and the field team, we use the Dell/Apple/HP serial or service tag as well, since the manufacturer can keep the specs and the purchase order info themselves.
We do this:
Brand Code is either D for Dell, A for Apple, H for HP, etc.
And VMs under them are:
VM
So right now, my box is CISD6XQDMJ5, but I'm writing on a VM called CISD6XQDMJ5VM04.
The beauty of this is that it lets the admins on SMS easily select departments by building queries that say:
for all machines that begin with "CIS", do this thing.
or
For all machines that the fourth character is "H", do this other thing.
and
for all machines ending in "VM??", do -NOT- do this thing, since it might be hardware-specific.
As for location and/or username, that stuff changes too rapidly to adhere to, if I know what -department- the box is in, I'll probably be able to find it, and the serial number leads back tot he model on the web site, so I can go to Psychology looking for an OptiPlex 270 that's acting-up.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails