So when I made a Masters degree in a UK univeristy I was just reviewing stuff I learned in my undergraduate studies in Mexico.
If I understand correctly the system in US universities, you actually have a major subject and a minor one. Well, in Mexico we have only a major subject for most of those 5 years.
Now, don't misunderstand me, I am sure all those wonderful universities in the US and UK are better than mine in many ways, but I feel better prepared to get jobs.
Perhaps people coming from India, China and other places are being more pragmatic regarding what is tought in universities. In my case my first job was in the University itself (all the administrative and IT personnel was hired from the University's students), so when I got out of Uni I have a vastly superior CV compared to people form other universities.
From there I moved quickly to a multinational coporation based at home, and once there the sky was the limit.
This history is being repeated thousands of times around the globe, people in the US can't do nothing to stop this, just closing your eyes to this reality (US jobs for US people? What is next? Ein volk etc.... ? ) will not make the problem go away.
Those foreigners are not going to Mars anytime soon. If you don't ket them in the US, then the technological means exist so they can do work from their own countries or from locations more amenable to foreigners.
The market for IT skills is global, even if you would pass laws to say no foreigner can work in the US (how stupid would that be?) jobs still would move to places where the same work can be done cheaper.
So you prefer that those people pay taxes and buy stuff elsewhere instead of doing so in your own country?
Honestly, I just don't get the logic some of you spouse...
If that was the case you would let the market speak, as things stand everybody is in the dark (you don't know how much you are really worth, and have no chance to move to where the jobs are).
The US should be looking at open borders treaties with the EU, China and India which would clarify the situation and allow US professionals to compete in a even playing field.
But the question is, do USians have an stomach for real competition? (Europeans do in general terms, the treaties in place ensure that you must compete, as do Indians and Chinese).
The US have companies with worldwide interests, but many people in the US somehow think that these companies could not possibly find good employees out of the USA' borders....
The best 100 are almost exclusively from rich countries (except China that manages to squeze in a few, mainly from Hong Kong).
From then on you see several names from other countires (Mexico, India, China, Taiwan, Brazil). These are still top Universities (I studied in one of them), perhaps not at the level of the top 20, but some of them have excellent Engineering and IT departments (my University is rated 150 overall, but our Engineering faculty is top 100, no wonder, we used the same text books used in top notch universities and it wasn't uncommon to have as teachers graduates from US universities).
People from these universities are anything but walk overs. Many of us were educated to lead, so if you think we are push overs that do "dumb-ass, cheap or shoddy" work I can just conclude that you have been unlucky with the kind of people you have met.
I will tell you something else: people like me, from a "humble" top 150 University in the world can stand their own pretty well against people from top UK universities (heck, I win jobs in direct competition with them, as do people from other countires). If you think we earn peanuts, then you are really smoking some seriously good weed, you should share it with the rest of us...
Many, many, many times have I had to chide another foolish junior sys admin for stupid naming schemes.
Here are my DO NOTs for hostnames;
1.) DO NOT use your hostname as documentation. Do not use the name to indicate it's location, what it does, or who operates it.
I agree about the company name below, but I could not agree less about the location or the function.
If you have many datacentres it could be valuable information, ditto for the function. It all depends, but frankly it is not mental deficiency if something adequate for the situation is chosen.
This one comes up over and over again because stupid admin wants to name his server "WizCorp-fs-001". I then remind him if he has a problem remembering what company he works for, because the hosts fully qualified name is "wizcorp-fs-001.wizcorp.com". Why not just name it "wizcorp-fs-001.wizcorp-server-room-001.california.wizcorp-IT-department.wizcorp.com" and get the stupid to the max right off the bat?
Dumbass admin # 2 wants his servers to have their location in their hostname, such as dbhost.PHX.wizcorp.com. This is all good, until the host needs to move to Nevada. Nice work there dumbass.
Sorry, if the host needs to move to Nevada you rename it. Period.
It is bad practice that a machine that is now somewhere else keeps the same name like nothing has happened. This has the potential of wasting time of people that need to access the machine only to find out that it is not there anymore.
Give me a machine that tells me where it is from the outset.
Generally, this one just goes hand-in-hand with admins who can't keep any documentation about their work.
The exception to the above is for special hosts, such as network devices, local resources (IP-enabled things that won't ever move, like an AC unit or environmental monitor), and cluster hosts. ISPs do this, and noob-admins see what the big guys are doing and somehow thinks that their piddly 500-staff office company needs to do the same thing.
--
2.) DO NOT make a hostname unpronounceable. There are three primary places where a hostname gets used; on the keyboard, on the label, and on the phone. If I can't go in with my cell phone to the computer room, read the label exactly as it should be sanely pronounced to another admin on the phone, and he can't accurately type it out after two tries, it's a bad hostname.
Oh please. ask for the name to be emailed or texted to you. If you can't bring your mobile in the DC then print the name beforehand: be prepared to service your machine. If you don;t know which machine you are servicing you should not be in the datacentre in the first place.
If your hostname is fs-01-PHX.6FL, you're probably an idiot. Again, hostnames are not documentation, and you need to be able to pronounce it. I can't pronounce that crap.
And, while we are on the subject, what is the problem with you people who can't label your hosts? If I was your boss, I would walk into the server room after every new host was installed with a checklist of things to make sure you didn't screw up. If you failed to label a host, you would get one warning, and then be fired. It's REALLY important that someone be able to find the host after an outage -- you won't be able to tell what the host is based on the monitor output, because it's dead! I would not be bitter about this one if it wasn't a problem over and over and over and over...
Do you have a change management procedure in place?
Why do you need to worry about labels at all? The work to initially set up a machine should be codified in a procedure where a bunch of check boxes are ticked as the work progresses.
I have worked in several large operations and a system along the lines you mention is the only sensible way to do it.
All the chaps whining about relocation or renaming of machines most likely work in operations with lax change management policies with relatively few ( 200 ) machines.
In my last gig we had 500 *desktops* running some flavour or another of UNIX or UNIX like OS's, forget about the servers....
If you change a machine's function you should have a process in place to do it properly. That would include to deal properly with host names.
Ditto goes for physical relocation (why do you need to relocate a machine? Build a new one in the new location and point the clients to that new machine). If you relocate a machine you have a process in place, part of which deals with host names.
These are not accidental tasks folks, these are regular tasks that should not catch anybody by surprise, if you don't have procedures for these tasks it is high time you should start to write them down...
Once you have more than 10 or 20 machines under your charge simple names just don't work.
If a new person joins an Admin team you will waste too much time explaining what sleepy, grumpy, and dopey do, in the other hand TXDALDC09DEV01, TXDALDC03DEVDB01, and CASFDC06QADB11 immediately suggest functions, you can refer this person to the document where the disambiguation is in black and white.
Simple rules go a long way. If for example you put the strings prod, cob, dev, qa in your hostnames then you at least have an idea of the importance of the machine (Dev, QA and COB not so important, Prod: I am betting my job in the sucker working as it should).
Try that with "grumpy" in an environment with 200 machines (only your team, we are missing workstations, other teams and other regions) and it quickly becomes obvious that pransksting around with names is not a professional policy.
There is always somebody willing to give you something for free in the net, so if you want to monetize your efforts then what you charge should be so negligible that it feels like if the service you provide is almost free.
... or the piece of paper and you are stuffed. And lets not even get started about how much up to date is the piece of paper.
I have administered machines providing as many as 20 different services at some point. Just by following a good naming convention I knew exactly what machine we were talking about.
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For bunnies sakes, I can tell you in 3 minutes if somebody has the skills they claim to have or not.
Here in the UK degrees take 3 years.
In Mexico they take 5.
So when I made a Masters degree in a UK univeristy I was just reviewing stuff I learned in my undergraduate studies in Mexico.
If I understand correctly the system in US universities, you actually have a major subject and a minor one. Well, in Mexico we have only a major subject for most of those 5 years.
Now, don't misunderstand me, I am sure all those wonderful universities in the US and UK are better than mine in many ways, but I feel better prepared to get jobs.
Perhaps people coming from India, China and other places are being more pragmatic regarding what is tought in universities. In my case my first job was in the University itself (all the administrative and IT personnel was hired from the University's students), so when I got out of Uni I have a vastly superior CV compared to people form other universities.
From there I moved quickly to a multinational coporation based at home, and once there the sky was the limit.
This history is being repeated thousands of times around the globe, people in the US can't do nothing to stop this, just closing your eyes to this reality (US jobs for US people? What is next? Ein volk etc.... ? ) will not make the problem go away.
So you are a tax payer.
Do you want your bank to be efficient or not?
If you do, you should allow them to make the best business decision. This may very well be hire foreigners for a variety of reasons.
If you want the banks to become a welfare agency, all the power to you, but that is clearly not what the governments are asking from banks.
Whinning. That is your solution.
Those foreigners are not going to Mars anytime soon. If you don't ket them in the US, then the technological means exist so they can do work from their own countries or from locations more amenable to foreigners.
The market for IT skills is global, even if you would pass laws to say no foreigner can work in the US (how stupid would that be?) jobs still would move to places where the same work can be done cheaper.
So you prefer that those people pay taxes and buy stuff elsewhere instead of doing so in your own country?
Honestly, I just don't get the logic some of you spouse...
I am sure that will be dead easy with so much evidence all around the place.
Which means open borders for foreign workers.
If that was the case you would let the market speak, as things stand everybody is in the dark (you don't know how much you are really worth, and have no chance to move to where the jobs are).
The US should be looking at open borders treaties with the EU, China and India which would clarify the situation and allow US professionals to compete in a even playing field.
But the question is, do USians have an stomach for real competition? (Europeans do in general terms, the treaties in place ensure that you must compete, as do Indians and Chinese).
The US have companies with worldwide interests, but many people in the US somehow think that these companies could not possibly find good employees out of the USA' borders ....
Programming, DB Administration, System Administration, etc.
Your prejudice and outright racism is a sorry sight.
Check information about top universities.
The best 100 are almost exclusively from rich countries (except China that manages to squeze in a few, mainly from Hong Kong).
From then on you see several names from other countires (Mexico, India, China, Taiwan, Brazil). These are still top Universities (I studied in one of them), perhaps not at the level of the top 20, but some of them have excellent Engineering and IT departments (my University is rated 150 overall, but our Engineering faculty is top 100, no wonder, we used the same text books used in top notch universities and it wasn't uncommon to have as teachers graduates from US universities).
People from these universities are anything but walk overs. Many of us were educated to lead, so if you think we are push overs that do "dumb-ass, cheap or shoddy" work I can just conclude that you have been unlucky with the kind of people you have met.
I will tell you something else: people like me, from a "humble" top 150 University in the world can stand their own pretty well against people from top UK universities (heck, I win jobs in direct competition with them, as do people from other countires). If you think we earn peanuts, then you are really smoking some seriously good weed, you should share it with the rest of us...
"Hostnames are not documentation."
Says who?
Many, many, many times have I had to chide another foolish junior sys admin for stupid naming schemes.
Here are my DO NOTs for hostnames;
1.) DO NOT use your hostname as documentation. Do not use the name to indicate it's location, what it does, or who operates it.
I agree about the company name below, but I could not agree less about the location or the function.
If you have many datacentres it could be valuable information, ditto for the function. It all depends, but frankly it is not mental deficiency if something adequate for the situation is chosen.
This one comes up over and over again because stupid admin wants to name his server "WizCorp-fs-001". I then remind him if he has a problem remembering what company he works for, because the hosts fully qualified name is "wizcorp-fs-001.wizcorp.com". Why not just name it "wizcorp-fs-001.wizcorp-server-room-001.california.wizcorp-IT-department.wizcorp.com" and get the stupid to the max right off the bat?
Dumbass admin # 2 wants his servers to have their location in their hostname, such as dbhost.PHX.wizcorp.com. This is all good, until the host needs to move to Nevada. Nice work there dumbass.
Sorry, if the host needs to move to Nevada you rename it. Period.
It is bad practice that a machine that is now somewhere else keeps the same name like nothing has happened. This has the potential of wasting time of people that need to access the machine only to find out that it is not there anymore.
Give me a machine that tells me where it is from the outset.
Generally, this one just goes hand-in-hand with admins who can't keep any documentation about their work.
The exception to the above is for special hosts, such as network devices, local resources (IP-enabled things that won't ever move, like an AC unit or environmental monitor), and cluster hosts. ISPs do this, and noob-admins see what the big guys are doing and somehow thinks that their piddly 500-staff office company needs to do the same thing.
--
2.) DO NOT make a hostname unpronounceable. There are three primary places where a hostname gets used; on the keyboard, on the label, and on the phone. If I can't go in with my cell phone to the computer room, read the label exactly as it should be sanely pronounced to another admin on the phone, and he can't accurately type it out after two tries, it's a bad hostname.
Oh please. ask for the name to be emailed or texted to you. If you can't bring your mobile in the DC then print the name beforehand: be prepared to service your machine. If you don;t know which machine you are servicing you should not be in the datacentre in the first place.
If your hostname is fs-01-PHX.6FL, you're probably an idiot. Again, hostnames are not documentation, and you need to be able to pronounce it. I can't pronounce that crap.
And, while we are on the subject, what is the problem with you people who can't label your hosts? If I was your boss, I would walk into the server room after every new host was installed with a checklist of things to make sure you didn't screw up. If you failed to label a host, you would get one warning, and then be fired. It's REALLY important that someone be able to find the host after an outage -- you won't be able to tell what the host is based on the monitor output, because it's dead! I would not be bitter about this one if it wasn't a problem over and over and over and over...
Do you have a change management procedure in place?
Why do you need to worry about labels at all? The work to initially set up a machine should be codified in a procedure where a bunch of check boxes are ticked as the work progresses.
Any person that is not
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That RFC was written in 1990.
Back then the idea of a company with datacentres all around the world, each of them with hundreds or even thousands of machines, was a distant dream.
Back then you expected to have one or two mainframes, a few minicomputers, a few dozens of PCs (at best) and lots of dumb terminals.
That world has passed, the RFC seems dated in places (it still may work for small concerns, but the advice clearly does not scale).
If yes, what is the problem with renaming?
If not? Why not!
I have worked in several large operations and a system along the lines you mention is the only sensible way to do it.
All the chaps whining about relocation or renaming of machines most likely work in operations with lax change management policies with relatively few ( 200 ) machines.
In my last gig we had 500 *desktops* running some flavour or another of UNIX or UNIX like OS's, forget about the servers....
Use functional names: they are scalable.
OK, we had 16 of them, and that was in one locality only.
We had 4 different localities. Do the maths.
The naming standard was pretty simple, it was
location service role number
so parftpprod01 was a host based in Paris, providing FTP service in our Production environment and was the first of 4 of them.
That way pardnsdev04 or oslhttpqa03 become self explanatory.
In a case like yours the master server could be nismaster (there can be only one master) and nisslave01. Simple, self explanatory and meaningful.
OK, we had 16 of them, and that was in one locality only.
We had 4 different localities. Do the maths.
The naming standard was pretty simple, it was
nis
so parnisprod01 was a host based in Paris, providing NIS+ service in our Production environment and was the first of 4 of them.
That way parnisdev04 or oslnisqa03 become self explanatory.
In a case like yours the master server could be nismaster (there can be only one master) and nisslave01. Simple, self explanatory and meaningful.
Have you heard of these technologies?
They are awesome.
If you change a machine's function you should have a process in place to do it properly. That would include to deal properly with host names.
Ditto goes for physical relocation (why do you need to relocate a machine? Build a new one in the new location and point the clients to that new machine). If you relocate a machine you have a process in place, part of which deals with host names.
These are not accidental tasks folks, these are regular tasks that should not catch anybody by surprise, if you don't have procedures for these tasks it is high time you should start to write them down...
Once you have more than 10 or 20 machines under your charge simple names just don't work.
If a new person joins an Admin team you will waste too much time explaining what sleepy, grumpy, and dopey do, in the other hand TXDALDC09DEV01, TXDALDC03DEVDB01, and CASFDC06QADB11 immediately suggest functions, you can refer this person to the document where the disambiguation is in black and white.
Simple rules go a long way. If for example you put the strings prod, cob, dev, qa in your hostnames then you at least have an idea of the importance of the machine (Dev, QA and COB not so important, Prod: I am betting my job in the sucker working as it should).
Try that with "grumpy" in an environment with 200 machines (only your team, we are missing workstations, other teams and other regions) and it quickly becomes obvious that pransksting around with names is not a professional policy.
... the last thing I would want to do is to obliterate the local population of living creatures.
Knowing how scarce life seems to be, it would be utterly pointless.
For all what I can watch?
Count me in.
A cent per comic?
Not in my whole life.
There is always somebody willing to give you something for free in the net, so if you want to monetize your efforts then what you charge should be so negligible that it feels like if the service you provide is almost free.
... or the piece of paper and you are stuffed. And lets not even get started about how much up to date is the piece of paper.
I have administered machines providing as many as 20 different services at some point. Just by following a good naming convention I knew exactly what machine we were talking about.
No need of fiddly pieces of paper.