I Want Names for my Servers!

Andrew Smith has written an excellent little feature on something so obvious that we usually don't give it a second thought: Server naming conventions. Since all my old machines are named after charachters from The Little Mermaid, and all the new Slashdot boxes use boring naming conventions like 'Linux360' (not for long tho!) I can understand this one. Its worth a read. The following was written by Slashdot Reader Andrew Smith. I don't want a Lime Mac, I want Names for my Servers! In some small way I, as a System Engineer, can derive pride from giving my servers loving ,meaningful names. Names like Xavier, Donald Duck, and Cyclops. In fact, this task that has always been one of the most enjoyable parts of being a System Engineer. Now they try to take this away from me.

"System Engineer" is the loving title my employer gives members of our small group that takes care of the servers. Linux, Solaris, AIX, NT, Novell; we are the shepherds that hold this herd together. Often we pet our respective servers, maybe run our hands over their keyboards or do a quick ping just to make sure they are okay. A server likes to be treated nicely, and if I must call it LNXSERVER0143 then it just doesn't get the kind of treatmeent it deserves.

At my previous employer the Netware goons had taken the initiative of using cartoon characters as the naming scheme. It all started with Rocky and Bullwinkle, moved on to Looney Toons, and slowly evolved to include Sesame Street for the NT machines and Disney Characters for the Unix machines. Nothing like logging in to WILE_E_COYOTE, BUGS_BUNNY, or ELMO to cheer up your day in your little cube of isolation. It helps to humanize those objects that can be such a pain. I recently heard of a company using characters from 'Taxi' and 'Mary Tyler Moore'. Being able to say, "Hey, is the hard drive on Mary going?" or "Rhoda isn't accepting logins any more" or "Someone tried to hack RevJim" provides just the kind of relief needed in that time of crisis. Of course, it's also fun.

But in the last few weeks I stepped out on the limb where I now am. I felt the rather lame practice of naming servers after trees (we have Ash, Oak, and Pine as well as others) was getting on my nerves. So I took the chance and named a few servers after X-Men. It's a good theme, with lots of characters to choose from and lots of cool graphics easily available. There is, of course, no official written standard at my employer, but the helpdesk supervisor who had his new app on the servers felt that Xavier, Storm, and Cyclops were not professional enough. They just didn't have the professional feeling of "Oak" and "Ash".

My day was, of course, destroyed. We System Engineers now are tasked to come up with a professional-sounding naming scheme or live with something as intelligent as the machine OS concatenated with the serial and model number, or some such nonsense. Oh the horror! Can you imagine "SOLARISSPRC20SN324234"? What a wonderful name!

Granted, one of my coworkers has suggested Dilligaf. With a little knowledge that one doesn't go over well, and it is but one name. A consistent theme is needed, a theme that fits with the System Engineers, the people who keep the servers happy.

The question has been posed "How will a new person know what the server does if it isn't named something logical?" Well, any person worth their weight in bits knows that XAVIER is probably a primary or secondary DNS, and CYCLOPS of course is a Helpdesk Web Server. It may take a little explaining, but my four year old could grasp it in a couple of minutes. I would expect a computer science major to get it in less than a few hours. And there are such things as aliases!

Xmen, television series, Star Trek ships... Give me my names, let me express myself! How can I as a System Engineer in my structured little cube with my structured little OS and my structured IP scheme live within these restrictive bonds forced upon me by an uncreative group of suits? I don't want a lime-colored Mac, I want real names for my Servers. I want to be able to have my NT Primary Domain Controller called CHER and the Secondary Domain Controller called SONNY. I want to have ELMO, GOOFY, and DONALDDUCK for SQL servers. I want to have Xena and Hercules be the firewall. Break free, my fellow engineers! Don't let 'the man' keep you down! Stand forth and name your servers, establish your theme, and create a standard before someone dares to put their foot down.

The freedom we seek today can only help those who follow us.

Keep the faith!

--Andrew D. Smith

Comments

Some principles for machine naming

[sparks]

There are very good reasons for giving particular machines "fun" names which don't relate to their form or function, except perhaps in indirect ways. It's all about future planning. Here are some suggested principles to use when selecting names for machines on a network.

1. Don't choose names which relate to funcionality.

This sounds like a joke ("he's saying DON'T use helpful names? huh?") but I'm quite serious. The new machine you are now installing might indeed be destined to run the mail server. All the same, don't name it "mail" or "mail1" or anything like that.

Here's why. A machine can change its function, and a function can be carried out by more than one machine. And machines can carry out more than one function. There is no straightforward one-to-one link between names and functions - so don't try to force one.

It's quite possible that at some point this new machine won't be the mail server any more. At that point, being called "mail" would be a more likely to confuse people than help them.

It's equally possible that you might decide to run a news server on the machine - while it's still a mail server. Can you imagine the conversation?

"I need some setup information for Netscape. What's our mail server called?"

"It's called mail."

"Oh, cool. That's easy. Now, what's the news server called?"

"Uhm... also mail..."

"Oh. Well that's dumb. OK. Finally I need to know what machine our LDAP server is on."

"Uhm.. it's on 'news'".

Not impressive, I think you'll agree.

Here's what to do instead. Give the machines arbitrary names. Then put CNAMES in your DNS for the services pointing to the actual machines.

If you can do that, you can tell people "our SMTP server is called 'SMTP'" and "our news server is called 'news'" and they can keep those settings for ever - you just change what the CNAME points to. You can even make the CNAME round-robin across several actual machines for load balancing - all without the user needing to know.

This doesn't just apply to the traditional services, but also to your own applications. If you have a stock control computer which people telnet to, don't call it "stockctl". Call it "bart" and put in a CNAME pointing to it. Even if you think you'll never change anything, it's worth allowing for the possibility that you will at the start.

2. Don't choose names which relate to form.

This means, for instance, that if your new mail server is a Compaq, it's a bad idea to call it "compaq" or "compaq3" or "cpq00153533" where 153533 might be the serial number.

Why's this bad? Because this information is a) useless, b) hard to remember, and c) likely to become wrong.

If you have a hundred workstations mounting volumes off a machine called "cpq00153533" you're going to have a rough time the day you upgrade the box to "cpq00182243". (Such names are also hard to tab expand if you've set up tcsh to do that as I have.) Unless, of course you just decide to keep the old name, although it is now wrong as well as annoying.

If you've called your machines "dellXXX", apart from trying to remember that "dell159" is your mailserver and "dell195" your quake server, you're going to be in difficulty when you replace some or all of them with IBMs.

The fact is that the manufacturer, model or serial number actually tells you nothing you need to know about a system in day to day use. You might need to know about its disk configuration, contents of /etc/passwd, or available memory, but you will rarely need to remember if it's a 333Mhz or a 366Mhz - and if you do, it should be in your product inventory database (hosted on "ibm104032" of course).

So, the principles in summary:

• Don't use functional names as hostnames. Put in CNAMES for the functional names instead. You'll save yourself lots of grief in the long run.
• Don't use names describing the physical setup, as that's useless, annoying, and incorrect far too often to be relied upon anyway.

Applying these principles requires that there be an "intermediate" naming convention which deliberately does not convey information about function, and which also does not convey information about setup.

I would suggest that this naming scheme should use names which are easy to type and remember rather than ones which are repetitive and formal. "srv001" through "srv999" might look nice and orderly, but in fact is much harder to remember and type than "rivers" or "cartoon characters" or "80's arcade games".

I like disasters or flops

[SnickleFritz]

Might as well as prepare for the worst. Sometimes they are tasteless but they seem to fit.

Hindenburg
Titanic
Challenger
Spruce Goose
TowerofPiza
Cubs

What happens over time.

[dmorin]

1. My boss arrives, and establishes the first Solaris workstation for the team. He names it artichoke, because he is boring and went with a vegetable theme.
2. I arrive next, and have always wanted to do Shakespearean characters (although I hear they are common, I've never gotten to use them). I have two machines to config, so I call them macbeth and macduff.
3. The first sys admin is hired. He follow my lead and creates hamlet, prospero, lear, and falstaff.
4. That admin, being a contractor, leaves us and is replaced. New admin sees macbeth and macduff and decides to go with the "mac-word" theme. Eschewing "macintosh" because it's too easy, he makes macnugget, macleod, mac-n-cheese(I don't know how he spelled it to make it legal) and macfly. He admits he stretched it in a few of those cases.
5. Seeing "macfly" his assistant goes with the "taglines from 80's teen movies" naming scheme, and makes the next machine bueller.
6. I don't know what comes next.

I may have forgotten a few.

RFC 2100

[Paul Johnson]

You could point out to your bosses that names like LNXSOX2324 are not compliant with RFC2100. Also the ACM article referenced in it could reasonably be quoted as a summary of best practice in the industry.

Paul.