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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.
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.
I laughed out loud. Using the IP address as the hostname? Genius.
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??").
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's a lot of work when someone changes a cubicle.
If only there was some lightweight, distributed DB that could be used to associate a hostname with an IP address...
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
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?