Slashdot Mirror
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 !
from the tempting-fate dept.
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...
Or you could name them after Linux distro's those are almost infinite to.
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
The seven deadly sins...
Nothing beats giving the sales guy a computer named "greed"
-J
I named my server Robert'); DROP Table students;--
Maxwell, Tesla, Watt, etc.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
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.
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."
At last count there are over 640K bugs! That ought to be enough for any organisation.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Some names will stand the test of time. A box with two monitors should of course be named Zaphod.
I Don't Work Here
Is this built up from the years of pent-up frustration developed by not having Sigourney Weaver in your lap?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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?
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.
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.
Rule of thump? Is that the one where if you have a software problem, you thump the system, and if the problem persists it's now a hardware problem?
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.
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.
tells you how to choose a name for your computer.
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.
I'd rather take this a step further and name them after viruses.
Smallpox.
HIV.
Ebola.
Polio.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
And if you are using scientific names, nobody will ever manage to spell them right. Keeps the processor demand low, at least.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay