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Server Names For a New Generation
itwbennett writes "Server naming is well-trod ground on Slashdot. But as new generations enter the workforce, they're relearning the fundamentals of what makes a good scheme. Can servers named after characters from The Simpsons or The Howard Stern show stand the test of time? If you name your servers after the Seven Dwarfs, can you have any doubt that Grumpy will cause you trouble? Striking a balance between fun and functional is harder than it seems."
... can I get sued for copyright infringement ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
My personal opinion is that bug names are a better solution. They are almost infinite. You never know when an organisation will grow a lot bigger than you expected.
Make it so.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
At my startup company, we named servers after notable videogame characters. It was quite nifty when we had three servers; it stayed fun for years. But when we reached 30 servers, gradually problems crept in. One machine needed to be rebuilt and the name kept getting reassigned. Similar names were confusing.
Server naming schemes are cute until you outgrow them. Hint: Determine for yourself when you outgrow them. We now name servers by their function and their sequence number.
I realise that the new generation may not be bothered with such mundane details in their pursuit of eternal hipsterness, but server names need to be functional. Whenever possible, IT should be able to identify server's location, platform and purpose by glancing at the name... "TEAMEDWARD1" just doesn't cut it, unless the server is located in some depressingly remote location nobody knew about, until the server was placed there.
I've used various naming schemes for systems I've setup (normally based on whatever video game I'm playing at the time). But the biggest change I've done is naming of virtual machines when I was administrating multiple servers, each running multiple VMs.
As I can have a lot of VMs on a single server, remembering what VM maps to what server can be a pain. I normally just do something simple like having the base server called "blue", then the VMs will be called "blue-1", "blue-2", etc. This helped me track down the host server quickly when I needed to fix something.
Its not what it is, its something else.
I know the Pokémon names are going to get old fast.
Star Wars, Star Trek, even Battlestar Galactica are great sources for names. JigglyPuff is NOT a server name!
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I name my computers, VMs, and bots after female characters (Inara, Padme, Daenerys, Trinity, etc). It originated from a long forgotten time when I can't get laid.
... I name all my systems "bob".
I also named my dog "Stay". Sure he gets a little confused sometimes -- "Come here, Stay" -- but like the server names, it keeps things interesting.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
[2 char OS Type] + [4 char location] + [2 char Hardware Type] + [2 char server role] + [4 digit Number]
WNNYNYVMPD0001
Windows server in New York Data Center running as a Virtual Machine in the Production environment first server.
RHLACAAMTS0200
Red had Server in Los Angeles Data Center on a AMD platform Test Environment 200th server.
My main server is called TARDIS, because it's bigger on the inside...
And my server ain't shaped like a coke bottle either
Can they still sue me?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
A server name needs to directly correspond to a server's function. I'm not saying you can't be creative but don't be stupid. When you grow beyond ~10 servers, cutesie names are going to cause you to work weekends trying to track down basic networking issues. Here's what I do: if it's a web server, start the name with a "W". MySQL server, start the name with an "M" and so on. If it's paired or load balanced, put a numeral on the end of it to identify it's system. Beyond that, I let the interns name the servers using whatever new-age cultural references their little inexperienced hearts desire.
Eventually you may outgrow any naming convention but by then you hope to be on an island sipping margaritas while someone else worries about these things.
There can be a naming standard that is applied to all devices, network, servers, storage, so on, that help simplify how an IT organization works. This has to be driven by management. Naming things by some arbitrary set of characters from your favorite story does not scale well, to say the least. Lets create a standard that scales like a mofo: ,logical identifer (0), physical device # (001)
ie, SJN1FIDBSW0001 The goal would be to have each device identified by a location (SJN), location code (1), businessorg (FI), zone (DB) device type (SW),
How about a web server in NYC datacenter 4 behind a load balancer, but in the DMZ, for the finance organization. The logical "placement" identifier really comes in handy to quickly tell where the hell something is located, inside outside, behind lb, not behind lb, in dmz, extranet bullshit, etc.
NYC4FIWEBSRV1001
Right now I've been using the names of AI's. My lastest is called "Post-dated Chw=eque loan," or "Petie" for short (From Schlock Mercenary)
Just name every server a character from LOST and then you'll have an explanation for anything that goes wrong.
i dont know about server names, but i name my hard drive volumes after types of simians. c: is gorilla, i: is chimp, j: is monkey.
Back in the 80s, I visited a MIT lab that used laundry detergents for their names, and each machine had the name from the detergent box taped to the hard drive. At the time, the hard drives were about the size of a washer and had a removable disk. Each computer was connected to a single hard drive. How times have changed....
At my work, they're more practical, and the first letter indicates domain (test, production, etc), second letter the OS, third letter server application type (webserver, database server, app server, etc), followed by a short name and number. When there are hundreds of servers, cutesy names just don't cut it.
I only have one server, so I call it Mother.
The laptop is Ripley.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Vaudeville acts - ...
for pairs -
Burns and Allen
George and Gracie
Sid and Imogene
singles:
Jerry
Dean
Milton
Perry
Dean
plenty of names to use.
The seven deadly sins...
Nothing beats giving the sales guy a computer named "greed"
-J
I named my server Robert'); DROP Table students;--
We use a very similar naming convention, slightly less granular, but effect; State, City, Use, Number ie NYNYFS01 = NY, New York, File Server, 01 (a second file server would be numbered 02) At home or in small business movie/book/game characters can be fun, but once you start to get more than a few systems and employees and that starts to become unwieldy.
hastur, cthulhu and nodens
still going, a decade after leaving the place they're housed...sometimes the Old Ones are the best...
Maxwell, Tesla, Watt, etc.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
Tends to work well. Unless you have more than 24 servers.
I used to use Final Fantasy VI Espers for server names... until it got too annoying to correct people on their spelling over the phone ;)
Cute names are so old and busted. "Okay, Kenny is the one with the accounting software that crashes constantly. Cartman is the old file server, because it's huge. Kyle is for the legal department."
Name your shit for what it does and, if you have multiple data centers, where it's located.
Or you could do something "new and radical" and use SNMP objects with all that information, and just name the server whatever you want.
On any network big enough to need those controls you are speaking of, you will have some kind of management platform.
morcego
There can be a naming standard that is applied to all devices, network, servers, storage, so on, that help simplify how an IT organization works. This has to be driven by management.
Naming things by some arbitrary set of characters from your favorite story does not scale well, to say the least.
Lets create a standard that scales like a mofo:
ie, SJN1FIDBSW0001 ,logical identifer (0), physical device # (001)
The goal would be to have each device identified by a location (SJN), location code (1), businessorg (FI), zone (DB) device type (SW),
The problem with that naming convention is you get very similar named servers, which might only differ by a single character in the middle of a hard-to-scan blob of text.
On colleague of mine has managed to flatten a production oracle server because he connected to the Manchester one, not the Washington one. The difference was embedded in the middle of the all-caps dns. Several people have restarted services on the wrong server too, again a single character difference in 15.
Since then I've instituted a policy of changing PS1 to prepend the hostname with the location in plain text.
When it comes to outside addressing, heigherarchial dns and cnames allow easy addressing. oracle1.washington.mycorp.com, web1.gaza.mycorp.com is fairly clear where the box is and what the function is, and when it comes time to reassign functions, you just update the cname.
"The Naming of Servers is a serious matter,
... those being DNS entry, IP, and the one which "the server itself knows, and never will confess."
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 server has three different names..."
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Devices at home get named after SC-BW buildings. Like Nexus for the server, Forge is the development machine, Pylon the Windows box and so on. At my current workplace the servers are named pretty bad. They are named with Manufacturer_Model_Number. I'd try to avoid that if I'd be in charge. In a company I worked for long ago, every maschine had to have the name of an alcoholic drink. Beer was a DB-Server there, Port did the firewalling. Employees workstations must have names from drinks which were typical for the country/region the employee originated from. Like the Russian dude's workstation was Vodka, the German guy's Korn. I think that was a good directive.
Nope, I think you mistook me for someone else.
Musicians at one, colours at another, snakes at a third so two machines destined to spend time at those sites were called "Brown" and "Green".
If you happen to have more than one server, name them like server0, server1, server2... There are other things you have to better spend your time in life.
I name my servers "Jane's" and then Function.
Jane's Annex
Jane's Library
etc.
Because lets admit it, if they ever become sentient, there could only be one name.
Who else to fight Bugs?
Some names will stand the test of time. A box with two monitors should of course be named Zaphod.
I Don't Work Here
Because of the risk of outgrowing a naming scheme, because you run out of names, or because too many names become a chore to keep track of, I once wanted to do a hybrid approach, but instead went with the _ approach in the end.
The initial idea were to use only a few names, for functions, ie. Frodo for File server, Gandalf for the Gateway, etc. But once you start doing that, you might as well just just Fileserver, or Gateway instead...
I'd say that in larger installations, "cute" server names are a thing of the past.
package com.company.servers;
public class ServerName {
public String createName() {
return String.valueOf (RandomNumberGenerator.generateNumber());
}
}
You will strain something if you have a twister mat laid out in mission control, so you can point out how to move data across your platform.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Unfortunately, customers weren't too thrilled to see their website hosted on "syphilis" or "herpes".
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Use subdomains for that. Bonus is that you can move stuff around datacenters without having to reassign hostnames.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
How did you manage to get _ working in DNS?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Please can we move on with our lives?
I generally just use the location and function of the server. Something like this: Country-Function-Number. So a web server in the US would be US-WEB-1 and the second database in Germany would be DE-DB-2. Makes troubleshooting and looking for a machine a bit easier.
Several years ago I was working at a network equipment manufacturer in Sunnyvale, Ca. We had 2 monster Spectra Logic tape silos. One worked petty well the other not so much. One was name "Gir" and the other was named "Dib" Gir used to do random things for no apparent reason like wake up, pick a tape and eject it. We would walk into the data center to find a pile of tapes on the floor. Nothing in the logs, no backups running, it just decided it was time to eject a tape. WTF! We had a name plate attached that said "Gir: It's not stupid, it's advanced."
Can't count the number of time the Spectra Logic field engineers were working on this tape silo but could never get it to work right.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
My former colleague used successfully disease names to servers. The hosts forming a cluster where index numbered, which resulted names such as cholera-1 to cholera-3 (file servers). Usually the worse the disease the worse the service was. And there where endless possibilities to humor. For example acrophobia cluster had troubles staying up.
I use antique names transliterated to English - eg. enki, metis, dagon, tiamat, pallas, etc. They're mostly short, easy to spell, pronounce and remember, and there's an almost endless pool to draw from.
The only problem with this is what's you've done when you fuck up your server.
I've been on the Internet a long time and, when I named my first Internet-connected computers, I thought it would be cool to name them after Star Trek characters. (The guys a floor up from me decided to name their after planets.) It wasn't long before I discovered that, at that time, half the machines on the Internet were named after Star Trek characters, and the other half were named after planets. I decided that, in the future, I would choose the most original naming scheme I could think of. I've been naming my computers after onomatopoeic words for years - screech, kablamm, whirr, etc. There are plenty of words, so the chances of running out are small.
The only time I got into trouble is when I was putting together a server for a customer, and I called it "crash".
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Moderate parent up please!
Full, descriptive names are the only sane way to name servers.
Alphanumerical gibberish is a system promoted by suit wearing idiots who's job it is to track corporate assets, not the people who's job it is to press the "OK" button on the "Are you sure you want to destroy this 5 TB volume?" dialog box.
No, you don't need the operating system platform in the server name, or the room code, rack number, owner, or anything else. Learn to use spreadsheets, asset tags, and description fields like a normal person. Name servers something clear and simple, like "ProdFile1" or "DmzDns2", and put the unrelated meta data where it belongs: elsewhere. Don't be afraid of CamelCasing either, just because server names are case insensitive doesn't mean they are not case preserving.
I've been at a site recently where there were wildly unrelated servers distinguished only by a single character, using both the numeral '1' and the letter 'I' in the same position. I saw, with my own two eyes, one of their senior admins moving the mouse cursor towards the "OK" on the "Are you sure you want to permanently delete this VM" prompt, and they had the wrong server! I corrected the guy before it was too late, so he then promptly found a second, also incorrect, server to delete.
"For a new generation"? I am afraid the only thing the new generation can come up with is Pokémon names.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
No longer an admin, but I have always given servers names based on their asset label, e.g. SV-0700543. The benefit of this is that the servers must be recorded in the asset register before they can be set up. When it comes to virtual machines I simply used a counter, e.g. VM-000001. The important ones (fsmo roles, database servers, app servers, etc) get friendly names with dns cname records.
The problem with naming servers after their functions is that in most shops, a server does more than one thing. And they often get moved / repurposed / whatever.
So that machine that's now ldap-ny-02? Well, last week it was web-ny-05. A couple months from now, are you going to remember that name change, and that web-ny-05 had that flaky power supply / fibre card / etc?
Oh, that service that had been running on lasco05? We moved that to the 'new' lasco03. (and there have been how many machines named lasco03?)
I've worked in a lot of places, and these days with clusters, virtual hosts, etc, you often have a different public-facing name (which will get used when people call in a problem ... how are they to know that some service is 5+ machines behind a load balancer? Or that all of the web sub-domains are really on the same server? Even if you don't plan for the abstraction, it already exists due to these different aggregations.
If you give the hardware one name when it comes in, and only use aliases for each of the public services, you don't have to worry about recycling names just so there's no service interuptions. ... and, true story, I've even worked in place with a machine named 'teller' after Edward Teller (the last article), as all of our mail servers were named after scientists ... but when I moved it for testing, I renamed the pair for that cluster to 'penn', and we later added a 'copperfield' and 'houdini' ... but we had to scrap the physicist names when our director didn't believe us that the spam filters weren't rejecting his e-mail because it was going through a machine named 'lovelace', and it was named after Ada Lovelace, not Linda Lovelace.)
I've worked with machines named after cheeses, spices, cartoon characters, music albums, movies, adverbs, muppets, states, rivers, tv-characters, the boss's family, periodic table, hashes of the service/location/os, astronomical phenomena,
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
FWIW our triple screen test machine is called 'hydra'.
(Well it was for many years, until the Windows admins took over our Solaris boxes, and started renaming them XXnnnn in sequential order :-( But 'hydra' is still an alias to it.)
Use whatever funny names you want until you got more servers than you can fit in one room! After that start naming servers room instead of individual server. If you get a way bigger room instead of an extra room name row in that Uber room!
Most of ours are named using the letters B, C, D, E, P, T. e.g. BD01PT034C and PTE02T056CD
Read those out over the phone and you'll understand the problems. Imagine the other person has a heavy accent too. Thank goodness we don't pronounce "Z" as Zee.
It's a cruel joke.
Setting up a postproduction facility, I once had workstations named respectively for their roles in the stream (Ingest/Offline, then Graphics/Compositing, then Sound and then Online) after the stations in the Haifa underground(1 mountainside funicular, 6 stops, perfect for the downstream metaphor). The first 'stop' had 4 Avids, so they were named 'East', 'West', etc.
Long story short, I'll never do that again.
My home computer is "DESKTOP" my laptop is "LAPTOP" the server at the small business I do handywork for is "SERVER"
My desktop at work is WDXXXXXXXXXX - our naming convention is WD (Windows Desktop) then S/N for the machine itself, this ensures unique machines.
Example WDAUD03122177A (HP S/N) it's also handy for the service desk to ask the customer to obtain the S/N of the machine for hardware faults too. So relatively logical.
Now, some of the people at work, long long ago who are unfortunately in much higher positions than I, decided to name ALL the servers "P000xxx" when I say ALL the servers, I mean seriously ALL of them - that's the naming convention.
Windows server? P000612 Unix server? P000534 Lotus Notes server? P000353
This security by obscurity is one of the most inane, stupid things I've ever encountered, this is for a fairly large Government department, it's confusing and frustrating as fuck. (Take note, those numbers are random, it's not like all the notes servers are in the 3xx series or all the windows ones, 6xx series..) I'm not making this up either.
That being said this same group decided on a new username standard, no longer will users get something semi-logical like js44 (John Smith 44'th person with J.S initials) (which I realise is ALSO not ideal) no no no, this Government department has opted for the following naming standard,.. wait for it.
YYYZZZZZ
YYY represents the state I work for, and zzzzz is RANDOMISED.
So let's say I work for QLD Govt, a username might be
"qldvz1sq"
Imagine working with file shares/folders where EVERY USERNAME starts with QLD
So we have:
qldvc1sq
qldvz2gh
qld412z
and so on and so forth,.. (fortunately new usernames get this standard, old ones retain the original standard to avoid 20,000 renames)
I really wish I was making this up, I really do! It's the epitome of security by obscurity and more so, security by stupidity. It's .... mind boggingly retarded. Utterly retarded, I can't think of anything less than retarded for it.
So please don't name your servers after famous Australian cricketers or Simpsons characters OR random naming conventions for the sake of security, do something bloody logical.
We name our lab servers after characters from the Muppets. There is an excellent Muppet Wiki which provides more names than we could ever need!
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Category:The_Muppets_Characters
These things are good:
ice cream and cake,
a ride on a Harley,
seeing monkeys in the trees,
the rain on my tongue,
and the sun shining on my face.
These things are a drag:
dust in my hair,
holes in my shoes,
no money in my pocket,
fucking stupid naming conventions from people who should know better
and the sun shining on my face
I prefer Real world names over numbers. Doesn't have to be anything too esoteric. City names will do. Or animal names.
It's just a lot easier to remember that Chicago or panther has a problem than S391 has a problem. Or was it S319? If sequence matters, then go in alphabetical order.
Of course, there's often a need to distinguish between different types of computers. Use another naming scheme. Countries, mountains, types of cheese. Doesn't really matter.
I find animal names work well, Kitten, Piglet, Elephant... not too hard to remember, unlikley to offend, etc.
The naming scheme depends on your company.
If you are a small shop with a few servers and one or two sysadmins, it really does not matter.
Once you go beyond one physical site you need to include an identifier for what site the server is on.
And the more people you have managing the servers, the more you need a standard. Because it is not YOUR server anymore.
And the more servers, the more you need a scalable naming system (which mean numbers somewhere)
One factor to take into account is when you list your servers, what is the primary way you want to sort them? For our company (with 500+ sites) it is the site they are on, so the first parameter is the site. If you are a single site shop, then it is probably function. Do whatever fits the way you work.
And then there is another factor: If your servers are called Mickey Mouse and Frodo, there is a risk that management will not perceive the IT people as the most serious bunch, and they will treat you according to their perception. If you present a well structured system, then there is a good chance that you will be taken more seriously when you deal with management.
For a long time I've had at least 5-6 systems at home, and naming machines was no big deal. Started off with characters from the Lensman series of novels and most recently name my systems after football grounds (ok, soccer...). Now that virtualization is so accessible though, I have literally dozens more virtual hosts on my network for development purposes, so now it gets harder. Prefacing the name of the host with "vm" helps, and the transient nature of a VM means that using a taboo convention like naming the host after its purpose (i.e. VMSIPSVR-1 for a SIP Server) is entirely acceptable.
But some nice suggestions here, my footy stadiums naming convention may have to change. Possibly favourite Liverpool players, so Torres would obviously not be an option and Carroll would be the system which gets the lowest hits.....
I joined a company with over 500 servers and a really incoherent naming scheme - or lack of. I could talk for hours on how you built a name out of a class hiearachy which also matched its class in puppet, but the dual naming them was a win. Basically it works like this:
When servers are racked up, they're just numbered, with a TLA for the location they're in based on nearest airport code.
lax-001
lax-002
lax-003
That name is PERMANENT unless it gets shipped to a new location. It also gets assigned an IP right away. But so far a bit meaningless. then it gets assigned a function
foo-web-01 CNAME lax-002
mail-02 CNAME lax-003
bar-db-06 CNAME lax-004
This has a couple of huge advantages, namely:
1. When a guy in the datacentre asks you for label names to rack them up, you just say "just number them 45-67", and they get on with it before you've even assigned them.
2. No re-labelling
3. You can look up the "meaningless" name just using DNS
4. You have a numbered inventory
5. With a bit of work, you can pre-assign IP addresses to servers before they've even turned up and get the network guys to tag them straight in to the switch on arrival
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
I got over this in highschool and found naming computers after characters or things to be counterproductive (though my home router still goes by discovery, and my main computer goes by monolith, and I used to have servers called Jupiter and Europa, and Hal-9000, I think you see where I'm going with this scheme) but I found after a while, it's easier to name servers after what they do and who owns them. as goodm easure, at work we call them after the company name, usually initials, with server tacked on.
so say, companyname being CNserver and then using CNServer02 CNServer03 CNSQL01 CNHVHOST and so on.
as a company gets bigger name the server after the location's internal name, if you have one, or by department CNHRSERVER
it's pretty straighforward and you understand what it is right off the bat, if you're paranoid, using a cryptic name might deter would be hackers, but in reality once they get past the firewall and land inside your network, they will go after anything and everything.
Plus, you have to remember where it is to find it, which sucks if you have more than one location. Why is it in SJN? What overall function does all servers in SJN have in common?
Assuming the function is "production1" or just "prd1"
FIDBSW0001.prd1.blah.blah
That's a start - now put prd1.blah.blah into the searchpath in every server in that location, so once you're on the bastion for that location, you only need the first bit.
How about some hypens? Now you can write code to separate the parts and do a bit of automation (eg. if you're using something like puppet/chef/cfengine):
fi-db-sw-0-001
Next. device type AND physical device? I should only have to know one of them. Since multiple devices can do the same job, I'll stick with the number:
fi-db-0-001
Not sure we need a logical identifier here.
fi-db-001.prd1.blah.blah, or just fi-db-001 if I'm logged into the prd1 bastion. There. fixed it for you
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
I know it's not really a sexy reply, but keep it simple... Something like Company-Function-OS-Number, Company-Dept-Function-Number, Company-Location-Function-Number.
Examples:
SD-WebLin-01 for Slashdot Webserver Linux N1
SD-WebWin-05 for Slashdot Webserver Windows N5
SD-MSSQL-C2N1 for Slashdot MS SQL Server Cluster N2 Node N1
SD-I30R5-LAMP-02 for Slashdot LAMP server N2 in isle N 30 rack N 5
It's boring, but it's functional. Try to avoid version numbers though, as you might upgrade along the way on the same machine or VM.
I've got a similar naming scheme in the datacenter, but here at the office I'm stuck with a Top Gun naming scheme. My predecessor thought it would be cool to name our local servers by Top Gun names. As such, we're stuck with Viper & Jester as domain servers, AirbossJohnson as ISA (now defunct & replaced), Pattern as NAS,... This is NOT fun to work with.
At home, sure, I named my servers and computers after THHGTTG, with stuff like Colin the happy security droid, Zaphod etc. But at work? No way.
Our old student filestore servers were named after the planets, and as luck would have it, uranus was not only the most troubled of the lot, but it was also the last to be decommissioned.
Pretty sure the server team regretted it pretty quickly... "Can you go down and give uranus a kick?" "All the users in your uranus are having problems logging in?" "Logins are taking a while - hows the load on uranus?"
Don't use meaningful names! Instead use a number scheme. Call your servers Z000001, Z000002, etc. That way you don't have to change servername when the server changes function, location, etc. (if that's how you previously named your servers).
If you really need different names then create a DNS Alias/CName.
For smaller shops, I see nothing wrong with naming your servers whatever you want. It's when you start to get bigger (say, over a dozen servers or so) that you are probably going to want to define a proper naming convention.
I actually name servers after people who are close to me in my life. It's nice to have a little reminder of those you care about while you are working.
...with the workgroup named for the Jafa home planet.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
A current case (page in German) of an Austrian person who got their door kicked down for naming his servers after ancient Germanic gods (which was good enough as an excuse to label him Nazi which is against the Austrian criminal code).
More likely, though, they didn't like his rather critical attitude towards the Austrian government and its position towards surveillance, and they needed some kind of excuse to fill his room with a swat team.
So be wary if you dare to voice your dissent, don't name your servers after, say, some Muslim prophets.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My machine is named as HAL9003 (successor of HAL9000). And yes, he has an eye.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I think this whole conversation is ridiculous. I work with server parks from 120 different clients, each using their own naming scheme. I've seen pretty much every suggestion made in this and previous threads on the subject. I never had a problem with it.
What it boils down to is this: if your administration is so bad that you rely on server names to know their function or location, you have no business being an administrator of any kind. Documentation is key, not some concocted naming scheme that makes perfect sense to you, and makes you look like an idiot without a life to whoever comes after you.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178
Use real words.
Random strings are inappropriate for the same reason that they
are so useful for passwords. They are hard to remember. Use
real words.
One of my company's largest clients (we're an IT consulting & support firm) has all their servers named after Simpsons characters. It's always good for a chuckle when I see "Smithers is Down" then "Smithers is up."
There's another company that named all their servers after wines (Merlot, Riesling, Pinot, etc) and all their printers are named after beers (IPA, Stout, Lager.)
in lots of locations worldwide, a standardized naming scheme works best... we use location, primary or secondary server number, application name, dev, test, or production, and which server in the cluster it is
so something like LAX1SDP1... we know where it is, what its function is, and how critical it is if something is going wonky at 2AM
it ain't sexy, but it sure helps keeping things straight
now as for my local network I know where everything is so I name mine after mythological creatures
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
tells you how to choose a name for your computer.
Firewall: shoresofhell
LDAP: shodan
Terminal Services: portal
Mail: postal
DB (crashes/dies 5 times a day): king-graham
At work we have over 600 servers spread across many cities, so we don't use any 'fun' names. The name has a standard of including city/location, function and number. Not our choice, this was enforced by a previous manager a few years ago. Even though location and such is all tracked in an inventory database, it is a little helpful to know where a server is located/function without having to look it up. Long ago, when we only had 50-60 servers and a different manager, they did have names based on celestial bodies and sports teams (weird combo, I know). Now with virtualization the function part isn't really useful, so we'll probably have to come up with something new, but meh, that's a story for another day.
At home however, my machines are named after the Endless/characters from Sandman. Destruction for my gaming rig, my SANs are named Lucious and Destiny, my main (non gaming) PC is Morpheus, wife's PC is Desire, etc.. etc.. I try to match the function with the appropriately matching character.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
At the company I work for (large international corp) we have a logical name and a friendly name. The logical name helps identify where the machine is geographically (country, data center, unit) and the friendly name which is given out to everyone, which can be whatever name was requested, as long as it is suitable. This way you keep both the network team happy (you can tell from the name where to find it) and everyone else too (they have a name that is easy to remember).
In the case of virtual machines and blades there is another logical naming scheme, adapted to the context.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
As an old guy, I am not looking forward to a future with servers named after Harry Potter characters. If Trek was good enough for us, it's good enough for our kids!
My servers are named using the surnames of erstwhile rock stars/musicians/celebs who did NOT die of natural causes. A scheme guaranteed to never run out.
There was a slight deviation when one host and all its virtual machines were named after those most likely to transition to the main naming scheme in the next five years. Thanks to Amy and Witney for making the transition. Watch out Pete, Britney, and Drew/Michael!
Don't be afraid of CamelCasing either, just because server names are case insensitive doesn't mean they are not case preserving
CamelCasing is ugly, but it's so much more readable than fucking all-caps. People who claim stuff needs to be in all caps because it looks professional should be mildly inconvenienced IMHO.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
One set of machines in our test lab were named after the original Windows utilities, so: Notepad, Cardfile, Reversi, Paint, Clock, Write. Later, Word and Excel got added. These were all Unix machines (Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, Linux, FreeBSD etc).
The Windows machines had names like Inherent, Increment, Inclement, Influent, Emergent, Accident, Adherent, Aberrant, etc.
I've been naming all my boxen after Autobots and Decepticons for the last few years. It's pretty cool because a lot of the transformers have specialized purposes, so you can name your boxes with familiar purposes, for instance, Soundwave could be a box that controls security cameras or a media box.
Just make sure to name your most error prone box Starscream.
We use a three digit location identifier that's intercompany and a small code depending on the application of the server: dc, sql, web, fs, etc.
I did an internship with a company that named their servers after rocks. They used names like pearl, emerald, diamond, onyx, ruby, etc. I still think think it's an excellent generic naming scheme.
Piled Higher & Deeper had a whole bunch of comics on this topic a while back: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1467 and my favourite: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1469
QuantumPete
When I worked at IBM I built two file severs for the dev group I worked in. I named the FUBAR and SNAFU and was formally reprimanded for using "Foul Language" in the work place.
By adopting a naming convention one only needs to start guessing until coming up with a matching name of another server in your network. Where I work we use elements of the periodic table, it will take you 5 minutes at most mapping all our server names.
My physical machines are named after the goddesses in A Megami Sama . General purpose server: Belldandy. Slower workstation: Skuld. Faster workstation: Urd. Netbook: Peorth.
My Amazon EC2 machines are named after cloud formations: Cumulus (East coast) and Nimbus (West coast).
I was also playing with some Chobits and Kyo Kara Maoh! naming schemes, but they're not in play right now.
www.wavefront-av.com
I always got a kick out of using WOPR.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
Company I worked at used five Windows 2003 servers. We named them Monday, Tuesday etc. It reminded us what day of the week we had to reboot them so they kept working properly....
I pick names for virtual servers like hilda, bertha, maud, Margaret, patty, bonnie and tina.... You figure out the connection.
In a bigger, work-related environment I would almost certainly do this differently, but my personal test network machines are named after the Dharma stations from the show LOST. The main machine being named "TheIsland"
I used to name all of our servers after famous mathematicians / physicists. Pretty nerdy but a big hit with the PhD's who used them. I've also seen movie stars names - FrankSinatra, GingerRogers, etc. And states / cities.
When my (then) 4 year old daughter fell in love with all things Wizard of Oz last year, I decided to rename the devices on my network in honour of her interest. So far, I've got the main characters: - lion: media server - tinman - dev server - scarecrow: my laptop - dorothy: my daughter's laptop - toto: the firewall I'm looking forward to adding more in the months to come (glinda, munchkin, winkie, et al). The names don't necessarily have to do with rhyme or reason (except perhaps dorothy and scarecrow, hers and my favorite WoO characters, respectively), but the convention is fun. Besides, my old naming scheme (elements from the Ultima game series) was getting stale.
I used to be the guy that argued, back in the 90s, that stupid robot-corporate naming systems like "lnx-mailsrv-034-a.us.example.com" were ridiculous, and point out all the advantages of real hostname standards. It did make sense then to pick a memorable name scheme which was independent of the machines' functional roles. Back then (and earlier) you bought expensive servers and kept them around a long time through lots of software and network/role changes, and servers were frequently multi-purpose long-life machines, and the counts were usually relatively low. Each server was a persistent thing to manage, an independent entity.
IMHO, these days the trend is so far in the other direction that those host naming standards no longer make sense. When you deploy servers in bulk packs of 200x generic x86-64 boxes as part of a virtualization farm and then carve out role-specific VMs, it makes perfect sense to name the physical hosts like "node034.farm03.us.example.com" and name the virtual hosts directly for their roles, e.g. "mail01a". Ditto for cloud servers carved from e.g. EC2. We're in a different world now for the most part.
Both scenarios always existed, there was always an argument for either naming route depending on your situation. It's just that the average situation has shifted pretty far in the "generic" direction over the past couple of decades.
Our servers are named after dances. Tons of good names to choose from, some of which sometimes relate tangentially to function. Unfortunately the British bosses put the kibosh on "shag." It would have been such a dirty little DMZ box...
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I like to name my servers after parts of a computer. It makes people asking for help hilarious. "Keyboard isn't working!" "Monitor is down!"
I know some servers named after Austin Powers villans - 'Dr Evil' (DC), 'Number2' (BDC), 'Minime' (TS)...
Then they added a SQL server called Mustafa which was repurposed for use on a DoD contract. They did ask for a quick explanation on why their server had a middle eastern name just after 9/11
Oh, and the DoD TS is called FatBastard.
We recently implemented a Hyper-V server which we named Grid and all of the virtual servers running on 'Grid' are named after characters from the Tron movies. (Flynn lives!)
The best server naming scheme I've come across was naming servers after cities, towns, rivers, lakes, and mountains in the locale of the business unit. The names are limitless. And people have a near instant mnemonic association with name/location and function. No one forgot what servers were used for. People had a "mental geographic map" of how their systems were interconnected.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
for small networks, doesn't matter.
for medium networks, srv001-srv999 and a spreadsheet
for large networks it really varies. but usually at least: [location][identifier][unique serial#]. maybe: nyc-db-005
A long time ago, I used star trek ships
then I used colors
now I use entries from the perodic table of elements. elemential weight is relevant to box type, with laptops, phones and low power machines getting the lighter elements, desktops getting the middling transition metals, and servers getting heavier elements
a friend used to use "manned US space flight missions"
Then there is the issue of scale. Both colors and elements have a long list of entries to scale well. Then comes the issue of discrete vs serial naming. Groups of machines don't get discrete names, but the group gets a name, and the machines are serialized. Lets there was either a server cluster or a computer lab, named for the elements. We'd name one cluster of workstations Iron, and the machine names will be Iron1-whatever and another cluster cobalt, etc....
I have started work on recreating my entire home network using ProxMox (a VM server running on Linux, offering both full virt for Windows and openVZ containers for other Linux distros). On my action plan, I decided to name my servers after cartoon characters that are relevant to me.
Being a huge 80s cartoon fan, the list is near inexhaustible, with short or long names. For instance, an extract of my list is:
* Tao, Esteban, Zia (from The Mysterious Cities of Gold)
* Flo (from The Swiss Family Robinson: Flone of the Mysterious Island)
* Astro (from Astroboy)
* Jayce (from Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors)
* etc (my list is much, much longer)
Then, I devised a way to create easy password to reconstruct, but hard to guess or remember. So, I take the username I want to create (typically "root"), I tack on at the end @servername.domainname (e.g: root@babar.myfamilyname.lan), then I prepend the string with a salt I have memorized and finally I hash that new string with SHA1 and extract the first 8 chars and add a couple of spaces according to a fixed schema (for instance you get "9 F4A BC3 2". I can't remember that password after 2 days, but I can easily reconstruct it on another machine, or even my phone. This is good for at least one user (root) per VM, the other users are driven by LDAP.
While we're on the topic, I also chose my IPs range to be easy to use. All static services are on 10.10.10.*. For instance, my DNS is 10.10.10.10. Since everything else is obtained from DNS, I don't have to remember too much else. 10.10.20.* is for my wired computers (DHCP), 10.10.30.* is for my IP phones, 10.10.40.* is for my wireless. 10.20.*.* is for remote (openVPN) machines.
JigJag
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
ok, but when you have 11 diag outputs to examine and report back on, it's near impossible to keep those alphabet-soup names straight. Your eyes play tricks on you with the "ells" and the "ones" and so forth. When the customer tells me that the hostname of the broken server is "NYC4FIWEBSRV1001", I say: "ok, let's call that one 'v1001' for the purposes of our discussion". But of course this extensible naming system would make sense to a PHB, who never has to actually REFER to it.
It's not about fun. It's about work. If it wasn't work they wouldn't have to pay you to show up, now would they? Besides real computer geeks get off on functional naminng convetions. Spare, functional, and logical. Ask yourself, "What would Spock do?" He would come up with a convention like .
Like ShaSS2DR2P which could mean "Shanghai sweatshop 2 disciplinary records server 2 physical". Note that servers are always named in chronological order so that ShaSS2DR1P would be older than ShaSS2DR2P and so would be ahead of the newer server in the hardware rotation queue.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Used to be cool and nice. But now with virtualization there are just rack after rack full of blades in the Server Room. You can't find enough Dwarfs to name them all. We used the Beatles long ago when the bank I worked at only had 4 giant HP-UX servers. But, those days feel long ago.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
I once worked in a medical library. I suggested that all the public pcs be named after diseases. There's a print job stuck on Syphilis. That naming scheme didn't get accepted though.
Our VOIP phones are (to us, at least) exotic sounding fruits: kumquat, jujube, pomelo, etc.
Our servers are more normal sounding fruits: orange, pineapple, watermelon, kiwi, etc.
And workstations are whatever the person using them happens to like: blueberry, raspberry, grape, papaya, etc.
This works better for our SMB than the previous system I came up with, which was a LOCATION CODE-PURPOSE CODE-NUMBER CODE scheme. That might make sense in a huge organization, but in a company about 50 connected devices, it wasn't worth the pain of nobody remembering which number they were and the pain of dealing with devices with very similar names. As devices were removed and replaced, holes in the numbering sequence developed that become more confusing (is that machine missing or was it decommissioned, let me look it up).
I couldn't remember that my phone was ASHWHPH003, but I sure do remember that it's "kumquat".
Nobody made a reference to the Magi??? I'm starting to lose my faith on ./
Democracy: Crowdsourcing a country near you
"JWoww" - is an advertising server, makes lots of noise but generally pretty lame content.
"The.Situtaion" -- has a flashy case with lots of bright LED fans but really doesn't have a lot of CPU.
"Snooki" -- This server goes down a lot
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Inspired by Trailer Park Boys
Firewall: mrlahey
Server: julian (big black box that everyone on the network always needs things from)
Old laptop: ricky (has duct tape holding it together)
Riced-out, flashy gaming box: jroc
My newer, smarter laptop: bubbles
Old-school XBox: coryandtrevor
Used to work at a major university lab doing brain research - liked the naming scheme there, all landmarks in the brain: Amygdala, Hippocampus, Cortex, Callosum, Thalamus...
May be should use a subset of alpha numeric characters that do not have ambiguities like they do in Electrical Engineering connector/BGA pin numbering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphanumeric "Subsets of alphanumeric used in human interfaces"
There are so many to choose from:
* chicken-choker
* lizard-drainer
* mushroom
etc, etc, and the list goes on and on for miles.
You would need a pretty massive server complex before you exhausted the list of possible names.
Oh, wait. You probably want names that can be used in a professional workplace.
Nevermind.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
How boring would it be to log into NA-WOW-015 instead of Ironforge? Or SE-FFXI-09 instead of Bismarck? I think sticking with the industry names is good enough. A lot of our clients are medical offices, and some of the servers have boring names, but others have names like "Baby" for an obgyn office. No one knows where SURG-446-SAV is, but just say "Scalpel" and you know immediately it's the surgery center server.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Naming servers after people, places or mythical creatures is a cute thing to do for your home server but it has no room in a business.
The purpose of naming a server is to know where it is, what it does and who it belongs to.
An simple example that will work for most small and medium businesses:
Example:
A = Datacenter Amsterdam
B = Datacenter Brussel
V = Virtual Machine
A-SQL01 (The first SQL Server on a dedicated hardware machine located in the Amsterdam datacenter)
A-DHCP01 (The first DHCP Server on a dedicated hardware machine located in the Amsterdam datacenter)
B-DNS04 ( The fourth DNS Server on a dedicated hardware machine located in the Brussel datacenter)
V-DC01 ( The first Domain Controler hosted on a Virtual Machine)
You can basically add/remove variables to fit your needs.
If you're a datacenter and host servers for others it could look like:
--
So that could look like: A24-wesellstuff-DC01
So that would be the first domain controller from the company We Sell Stuff that is located in Amsterdam mounted in the 24th enclosure.
So if your monitoring tools show that the server A24-wesellstuff-dc01 you know right away where the problem server is located, who owns it and what its primary function is without the need to dig trough documentation.
Turning a server name into a way to store information about the server is problematic. Hardware, location, role etc should all be recorded independently of the name in a rdbms which everyone who needs it has access.
Deleted
We name our servers after beer. mmmmmm beer...
I worked in a Remote Hosting data center facility in the healthcare IT industry - over 5000 machines for a customer base of 180+ different clients, for application sets that typically required anywhere from 25-75 servers per customer. We actually had a naming standard, documented and updated regularly, that served us pretty well. The only thing the naming convention doesn't cover is physical locality, as at the time the standard was developed it was only the one facility (now at 3 and growing). There was also an seven-character limitation at the time it was originally developed. It still serves well, and I can identify a server function by just glancing at it.
Format:
CLIENTID | ENVIRONMENT | VERSION | FUNCTION | CLUSTERID/INSTANCE
AA|B|C|DD|E
CLIENTID - Two-letter code indicating to which customer the equipment belongs
ENVIRONMENT - Single-digit indication of environment (1=PROD, 2=TEST, etc...)
VERSION - Single-letter indicator.Clients moving to new versions of our software or getting a tech refresh would increment (A,B,C,etc...)
FUNCTION - Two-letter code indicating application and/or function of server.
CLUSTERID/INSTANCE - Single-letter or single-digit. A letter would indicate a clustered condition, incrementing with additional servers. A number would indicate a stand-alone or non-clustered instance.
Examples (not real customers BTW):
PD1AWS1 - Podunk Production Webserver, "A" (1st) environment, single-instance machine 1.
HS3CMSB - Hayseed Training Master Database Server, "B" Node in a cluster.
ST2DCT8 - Styx Test Citrix Server #8 in the customer's fourth complete environment.
It's not perfect, but it worked out *extremely* well for a multi-client hosting scenario with thousands upon thousands of machines. Just by hearing the name we were told which client, the environment (important to know if it's PROD or not, right?), which set of servers it was (some clients had multiple complete environments and would only be live in one of them), and what it's function was. Knowing if it was clustered or not also helped, as this prevented a lot of active nodes from being accidentally made inactive if you catch my drift. They've added some extensions since I left to indicate various other states such as VMs and things. I proposed some additions that pushed it out to 9 characters and added a lot more functionality.
I didn't want to do anything so complicated, especially if I have to type the names over and over. So I decided to just use single letters of the alphabet. Nothing's easier than typing a share when the host is only a single letter long! Eg. "\\a\c$".
And to make it even easier to organize, IP addresses match the letter number. A is .1, B is .2, etc.
It wouldn't work for a business, but for home, why make it any harder than needed?
But we decided not to, when we realized how it would sound to say "Pussy Galore went down on me today, that's the third time this week!"
With "uranus" reserved for the VPN remote access server.
I have a theory that our Windows support group uses a set of Bananagram tiles to name their servers. XLBASWWRTPD1 is typical.
We name our hosts as per below: xxxyyynnnn where xxx is the three letter site/physical location designation, yyy is designation for type (i.e. svr for servers, wks for workstations, net for net appliances, etc.) and nnnn is logical 4 digit. This way we never have to rename a server because the functionality has changed, etc. We also assign CNAME for servers that is providing a service (i.e. intranet.local for our Intranet site or torsql2k8intranet for SQL Server 2008 instance using for SharePoint and located in Toronto).
Naming a server is like naming a child, you have to realize that what you name your server will define it for the rest of its life! Which is why my newest server was named "Cyber Turbo Death Grinder 6066 --Laser". I can't imagine ANYONE wanting to mess with that. Unfortunately I was not allowed to name my child something similar. I blame this nanny state we live in.
Actually I just wanted to see what it would be like to post on the internet.
I named all the windows servers at work after female pr0n stars. Great times being able to say weekly that MarilynChambers, StaceyDonovan, or ChristyCanyon is going down on me.
Had a solaris box named HarryReems. He's been up forever!
Cheers,
RM.
Nobody's as dumb, as I appear to be
I personally find "fanciful" names for servers a little on the poor-judgement side of admin and they can lead to some regrettable situations when theres any real number of servers. We use dns to separate by location and network i.e. vlan.loc.domain.com, though vlan is a name, not a numeric. Then the server name defines its role in life. We dont generally mutli-purpose any server, though if we do it'll get a cname. Most things also have cnames to define roles as well.
for eg, lxweb001.dmz.sing.domain.com (linux web server 1 in the dmz network, in singapore), which might also be known as web001.dmz.sing.domain.com but if its a globally relavent server, it might also be web001.domain.com. It might also have a cname like web001.japn.domain.com meaning it also serves web content for japan, etc etc.
We never re-purpose servers (as in, web->dns) without rebuilds
and the one which "the server itself knows, and never will confess.
That would be its Active Directory computer account SID/GUID.
There's nothing wrong with coming up with creative names. A hybrid naming scheme would work well as you scale up. If you have clustered systems, you wouldn't want to name each node something different. You could name your main node something like hive and use hive1 through hive99 for all the other nodes. If you're a large organization, you could still use name to identify buildings or floors. Odyssey1 through Odyssey20 for the 20 systems in building 15.
Let me tell you, I tried this, and it really hasn't stood the test of time. In 1994 I set up a small network with names like "Homer", "Bart", and "Flanders" - nobody remembers those characters any more! People keep telling me to rename them "Peter", "Meg", and "Quagmire"... I don't know what that's all about, some old TV show that got cancelled years ago I think.
Bow-ties are cool.
I went with Appleseed.
My routers are Deunan Knute and Briareos.
My servers are Athena, Hitomi, Niki, Tereus and Yoshi
vi +
I don't have the luxury to name our servers (and I hate the convention prefix we use) but I name my linux workstations based on Tux's environment. .. laptops are "icecube" and "icicle". I still feel like I'm missing a good name though. I don't think "ice sheet" or "ice block" have enough of a ring to them, and "snowball" is way too cutesy.
.. and yes, I'm aware there are no eskimos to build igloos at the ANTartic, but the name was too cool to pass up.
The most powerful workstation's name is "Glacier", others are, "iceberg" and "igloo"
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I've run into some doozies:
* A mix of obscure Latin-based terminology (medical terms, mathematical/scientific terms - mitosis) and/or folklore references (ghandi, chiva). Eg. "sentinel" would be for monitoring
* Anime characters. Seriously, what the fuck. You can barely get more obscure.
* Any cryptic and useless naming convention: Simpsons is a good example. What does 'bart' do again, and is it an important system?
It's one thing if you're the sole administrator somewhere with a handful of servers. It's another if you've got a complex environment with many systems.
A better approach is a naming convention which matches and documents the environment. "ldap" is ldap, "ad1" for your primary AD server, and so on. You are a professional, not a cartoon animator: you are not creating characters with personalities, you are a professional maintaining machines which perform work.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Kandi is the working girl. Koko is who she gives all her proceeds to every night at 2am.
We obviously don't work with women.
Gurren
Lagann
Lancelot
Deathscythe
Heavyarms
etc.
Stupid.
Location, Function, Number if needed, done.
IE:
USAEdiOutbound
USAEdiInbound
USAFax
MexicoMailServ
BCExchange1
BCExchange2
Done, you know what it is, what it does, where it is located, and you don't even have to remember anything when looking at AD or a DHCP listing...
And when something breaks you can tell the intern: "Hey, go to the server room and flip that POS exchange server."
No worries about flipping the wrong server ever.
A long time ago, I used star trek ships
then I used colors
Does Mauve really have more RAM?
Why not Zoidberg?
No really, I used to use King of the Hill characters, but when it came to a server at a new host, I couldn't answer the above question, and now I have a server named zoidberg.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html
read it, understand it. thinks like "mailserver" or even "x101" or "debian-mail" are bad ideas ...
--
.nosig
When I worked as a coop student at Acadia University, the old room filling UNIX server which the tie dyed t-shirt wearing balding beard toting admins would turn the lights out and show all the pretty flickering lights was called "Gandalf"....
It somehow seemed appropriate.
Lots of them end in -OS, too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Greece
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Antoine Roccamora, Marsellus Wallace, Mia Wallace, Vincent Vega, Jules Winnfield, Yolanda, Butch Coolidge, Lance, Jody, Zed, ...
"Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead."
obfuscated location_function_asset number
It was established before my time with the company. While fairly good I would like something better. Some of the guys at other sites have been doing variations of this or different conventions for some systems without discussing with anyone else, which results in some minor confusion when supporting their undocumented network.
So we first started out using signs of the zodiac for our server names. Of course this became a problem after we got to 13...so we decided to move to constellations since the zodiac names would still fit. When it came to naming a server for which we had a particular software product that constantly gave us more problems then we could deal with (company initials started with 'CA')...we decided to use something to distinguish it amongst the others AND relate our frustrations. We chuckled long and hard...but the chuckling came to a full blown roar when months later we were all sitting in a room with a lead developer from said company that was onsite to rebuild their software on the server because we (and them) could never get it working right. Those present included our senior management and the local, regional and divisional representation from said company (with the initials 'CA'). It isn't too hard to image what came next... yup, in the steps to rebuild the server, their SME refers to the server as 'Cancer'... one of the FUNNIEST days of my career.
You can blame NetBIOS name service for that one (windows zeroconfig host discovery), especially the populating of "workgroup" on certain Windows versions which would always display in all capitals.
bravo-delta-zero-one-papa-tango-zero-three-four-charlie. It's a shame this problem was actually solved back in 1932 (though not perfectly being the currently used variant).
I used to work at a small stock photo agency as The Company's IT Guy. When I got there, there were already two drives, named Goldman and Tinman. Eventually they needed a third one, and I christened it Megaman.
Kenny, that's our webserver hostname. It has been stable ... so far.
The rest are named after Viking mythology.
I name mine all localhost. It's quite easy to remember and I can always connect to them.
All My network Devices are named after the corresponding element on the periodic table based on the last octet in their IP address
My servers are nameless. Really.
See http://namelessnet.net/
After going through famous military ships (RIP Bismarck!) and female video game characters (I still love you Tanya and Natasha!) I finally settled on names of Stars. Not people, actual stars. Yanno, in the sky.
My current systems are Deneb, Altair, Rigel, Vega, Spica, Mirfax, and Canopus. Well...and technically Toliman and Pollux, though my Android Tablet and Phone only use those for Bluetooth - they're stuck on the factory default random names for WiFi.
The nice thing about this is that the potential names number in the millions, and you can strike a very comfortable balance between uniqueness and notoriety. For example, my favorite star is, of course, Sirius A, but the odds that I'll end up on a network with another Sirius are pretty high. So to with Deneb, Altair, Rigel, and Vega, but those are servers at home, so no problem. Mirfax, though? Doubt it.
At one data center, we gave names to city (by airport code), server row, rack and bottom U number from the bottom of the rack. It helped keep inventory straight, but it was boring. We did CNAME for a functional name that customers knew about.
At a big company we did airport code, floor, room, and appended letter for printer/desktop/storage server/compute server/,etc. ... Still boring.
At another big company each site was independent. One dept has a car them, dwarf theme, football theme, religious names, etc ... still lots of confusion ensued, but a lot more fun.
At home I have used screendoor (firewall), backdoor(dial-in server, long gone), faith(faith that it is more robust and will keep running), hope(son, hopeing he will not do to much porn), charity(wifes machine where we did book keeping), love(daughters machine), nomad(my laptop), winmad(windows laptop-windows still drives me crazy), rodeo(wife's laptop - she's into horses). ... For small installations, having fun with machines fun names are good. I still like to have a 'logical connection'.
I name my servers (and desktops and laptops) after Canadian National Parks I have visited -- so Fundy, CapeBreton, BrucePeninsula, Yoho, Kootenay, Kouchibougouac, Auyuittuq etc -- I keep those hard to type ones for infrequently typed names like print servers.
I name all my computers after mechanical devices from THHGTTG. My desktop is Marvin, and my laptop is Deep Thought.
http://tinyurl.com/42geekcode
it seems to me that server names should:
1. Be easy to speak, write down and memorize
2. Identify a specifc machine permanently
By extension, they should:
2a. Not relate to the function or location of the server, as that may change
The main requirement for point 2 is that the name should be unique.
The main requirement for point 2b is that the name should not contain any information about what the server is or does.
These requirements could both be met by generating names by incrementing a counter, but could run up against point 1.
Point 1 can be met by using real words or names from a class, but that has the problem that it only scales as far as there remain available names in that class.
So, I propose using something like a phonetic password generator to create fairly random unique server names of varying lengths from pronouncible strings of syllables. These would be easy to speak, fairly easy to write down and easy to memorize if one were to deal with a particular server for any length of time. Another scheme might be to have a data set of human names and surnames, and pick random combinations of these to assign to servers. There seem to be enough human names that we don't get confused between specific humans too often, so the same might work for servers.
Additional meanings or information could be conveyed and searched upon by means other than server names. Meaningful names for more public use and memorization will tend to relate to the function of the server rather than the specific identity of the server, and can be assigned as aliases where necessary in a more dynamic way.
depends, it is easier to read when on a shop print. No guessing is that an L a I or a 1...
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.