I Want Names for my Servers! 862
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
Echelon keywords (Score:1)
how 'bout/// (Score:1)
(followed by some luser who writes:
second-post.domain.com !!!
Got it, beeyatches!
Drugs (Score:1)
swedish cartoon names on our servers (Score:1)
Prisons (Score:1)
Re:Mythology (Score:1)
I still like my boxes:
Hookah
Shisha
Nargile
server names (Score:1)
Having a coherent naming scheme is not only fun but useful: when a user says something like "I can't log into krypton" I at least know what I'm dealing with (IRIX, in this case). Using names like sparcstationnumber234 isn't just obnoxious, it's an organizational mess despite the effort to the contrary.
Re:Beer! (Score:1)
Re:Prisons (Score:1)
Re:Mythology (Score:1)
I've strayed away from the naming scheme, though. Dis was renamed to evil only weeks after installation, and my new laptop is tertia (it's the third laptop I've gone through). I may return to a mythological naming scheme if I resurrect mercury, as I'm contemplating the names lazarus and osiris for it.
Re:Mythology (Score:1)
Message from god@heaven at 12:45 29 Oct 1999:
....
I'm coming for your soul at 3:00 this afternoon.
The Green Mile (Score:1)
Edgecombe
Coffey
Delacroix
Mr. Jingles
Creativity is the key! (Score:1)
octane
pentane
hexane
methane
heptane
At work, however, we have creative names like:
office01
office02
And a few really creative ones on peoples personal machines:
miracle
mirabelle
defcon6
Creative bunch we are!
jason
Machines shouldn't be named after their functions (Score:1)
The functional names (mail, dns, ftp, www) of the machines should be listed in DNS as CNAMEs.
For the record, at my former employer we used names of pagan deities. Where I am now we use animal names.
--
Re:duh, okay, my server names. . . (Score:1)
My other machines:
lynn: My first Linux box.
xena and gabrielle: an XT and the Linux box that routes ARCnet for it.
deliah: A Dell.
arienrhod: Built out of parts that came out of cybil (that really should be the other way around).
amanda, tessa, and anne: The Macs.
There's also anastasia, cassandra, cloe, and eddi, who haven't got humor buried in their names...
Oh, and I named my workstation at work grover. The box is from Big Blue, and I work for a PBS station... (We've also got an oscar, and we had an elmo for a while.)
Soviet Aircraft (Score:1)
Yeah, it wasn't very practical and it got a not too approving reaction from the instructor, but at least it sounded cooler than 'ASSIGN1', etc.
The NATO codenames were colorful yet cryptic, and with a system behind them: B for bombers, C for cargo (transports), F for fighters, and so on, with one syllable for propeller aircraft and two for jets.
These days, if I were setting up a network I'd probably just go with Simpsons characters.
Re:Soviet Leaders (Score:1)
Re:Rockets scientists and job title rant. (Score:1)
I'm currently looking for a famous Russian rocket scientist for a third.
>>>
Is "Tsiolkovsky" too long or cumbersome to type?
Re:Our CTO has half a japanology degree... (Score:1)
You should have stuck with the food theme - there's plenty more, after all. But at least I don't see the really cheesy ones like geisha, karate, and Godzilla.
My namings. (Score:1)
Professional? (Score:2)
- Gates
- Jobs
- Ellison
- Metcalfe
etc., etc...How about naming them after *servers*? (Score:2)
Yeah, but look out for smurf attacks! (NT) (Score:2)
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
Re:The normal standard... (Score:2)
Be fair. (It's good for credibility.) Any time there's a semi-serious problem, you're gonna be hitting y for quite a while w/ fsck.
I've lost entire file systems more than a few times because of an unscheduled reboot, incidentally. The same has happened, incidentally, w/ NTFS, but never, ever, ever with FAT/FAT32.
It's actually enough that there's a semi-decent chance I'll make my MP3 partition a Fat32 one.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
P.S. Don't tell me Solaris is any better; it made some noises significantly scarier than "extra bytes discovered" when I recently bungled a shutdown.
Re:The normal standard... (Score:2)
No. You don't understand.
If you slam the power button on a FAT/FAT32 box, you're not gonna lose the partition.
You can't say the same for a Linux box using ext2, or even a Solaris box using UFS. From *VERY PAINFUL PERSONAL EXPERIENCE*, you have quite a decent chance of damaging some serious stuff, and way more than an unheard of possibility of just completely losing the filesystem.
FAT/FAT32 can recover from random reboots without a problem. It's simple enough to just not have the same kind of problems as Linux w/ ext2.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Re:The normal standard... (Score:2)
In all fairness, Windows has gotten quite good at handling random reboots.
This is not a strong area of ext2, to say the least.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
The normal standard... (Score:2)
Descriptive (as opposed to family class) Numbers belong in IPs, not in the names. Management which attempts to look professional by forcing mnemonics out of names is merely making their staff less efficient; humans are shockingly efficient at handling large numbers of names.
We're not that good at identifying objects by number, unless those numbers are drastically inconsistent(thus, the low number of phone numbers we know that are almost identical).
Myth, Literature, Movies, Movie Genres, Computer Components, Biology(I'm itching to have a Mitochondrial web cluster), Famous Wars, Famous Scientists, Tremendous Disasters(Hindenberg just went up in flames), Great Treaties(Versailles is looking OK for now...but I have a feeling it might fall apart), etc.
Humor is always good, but mainly when its subtle. That way, there's always plausable deniability.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Boring/Hideous Female names (Score:2)
Jane - Mac Duo 230
Edith - Cyrix MII 300 Caldera 2.2
Molly - Celeron 366 Win95
Don't know why, but these name entertain me.
Prolly need a hazel and martha too.
Naming schemes I've used (Score:2)
At my old company, the servers had boring names, but the shares were all with a different theme for each server. We had Ren & Stimpy, the Simpsons, the Brady Bunch, and the Beatles (after the first four, we moved on to Beatle wives, first wives, Pete Best, and Stu Sutcliffe). We use boring names at the place I work now (don't blame me - we were using the scheme when I got here). We just name the server for it's task (Company-Mail, Company-Production, Company-File, etc).
Another thing at my old company - I had one of the cool (at the time) Mac Quadra 840AV systems, with the DSP chip for video and audio processing. Then I needed to give it up for our color department, but I kept the drive and put it in a slower Mac. The Mac was renamed Helen Keller, since it was both blind and deaf. From then until the day I left, That remained the name of whatever Mac I used.
- -Josh Turiel
British geographical features (Score:2)
Chris Wareham
Sun hardware and McDonalds food ... (Score:2)
Chris Wareham
Re:rfc2100 (Score:2)
Actually, it's not. Right after I originally wrote it, and it was published, a correspondent explained to me that the meter it _is_ in is called 'anapestic tetrameter'.
I just liked the joke.
Cheers,
Re:Wintermute, and Grateful Dead songs (Score:2)
- PS/2 Model 80 [ibm.com] - behemoth
- PS/2 E [tripod.com] - stripe (because of the green stripe running round the outside)
(I also have a machine named grotto, for similar but obscure reasons.) But most PCs these days don't look as distinctive - and you will probably have many looking the same.Hmm, darkstar, that was the default hostname that Slackware chose for you, back when I used it. Is it still the same now?
Some themes: (Score:2)
2. Bloom County characters.
3. Norse Gods.
4. Sci-Fi authors.
5. Some mail servers I know of are named after
nearby train stations.
I've noticed... (Score:2)
So when I got control of the DNS zone, my first sysadminial job was to give decent hostnames.
One IP block got characters from J.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and "Silmarillion."
The other got Sumerian/Babylonian gods. Nothing like logging into marduuk to feel better about yourself.
AS for my domain, I just make as many cheezy puns involving thw word 'breakdown' as i can (the server in my info is down btw)
chemical.breakdown.org
nervous.breakdown.org
mental.breakdown.org
emotional.breakdown.org
molecular.breakdown.org
total.breakdown.org
communications.breakdown.org (my *backup* mail server, isn't that witty!)
Basically, if I see another greek/Roman naming convention, I will have to slap people silly. There are hordes of fun pagan pantheons to use. Hell, they don't even need to be REAL! yog-sothoth.foo.com would be fun to admin.
I can picture an exasperated sysadmin. "Yog-sothoth is possessed, I swear." "What could possibly possess a machine named after a demon?" ( || "Something worse: NT.")
Words I like (Score:2)
Second point: I like to name servers after words that I like. It's not a very coherent scheme, as these words can sometimes be names, sometimes moods, sometimes adjectives. But they're all words that I like, so as far as I care, it's a perfectly rational naming convention (as in, I can always tell if a name is part of the "potential names set" simply bty thinking: 'Do I like it?'). My current machines are named continuity (and you all know where that comes from, right?), paranoia, and velocity. I'd think of some more, but I haven't had enough coffee yet today. My vocabulary hasn't woken up yet.
----
Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
names, wrong and right (Score:2)
My machines at home are named for elements. My Thinkpad 486/33 printer server is named Hydrogen. My main work machine is named Helium. I have a Thinkpad laptop that is named Lithium. I used to have a machine for experimentation named Beryllium, but that's too much to type so I named it Boron instead. My wife's machine is named Platinum because that's the substance our wedding rings are made of.
And the really nice thing about these element names is that they have standard abbreviations, so I can type telnet lithium, or I can type telnet li. I have noticed that some programs do not like single character machine names, so telnet h to reach the machine named hydrogen doesn't work.
They tried to do that to us... (Score:2)
In fact, this is much handier than ordinary 'descriptive' names. For example, we're in the process of replacing our old single-CPU mail server with a new SMP box... At the moment 'mail' is aliased to the old box, 'hermes', while we prepare the new one. Once it's ready to go, we transfer the accounts & spoolfiles, adjust the DNS so 'mail' -> 'coyote' and voila -- the users don't see a blip.
I tend to prefer mythological/religious names, probably because they command a little more awe and respect than names like "Tweety" and "Goofy". Unfortunately, I'm no good at keeping it within one culture...
At the moment:
mail server: Hermes
mail server-to-be: Coyote
Intranet & "Knowledge Base": Thoth
Webserver: StellaMaris
Oh, and at home, the outside of my firewall is named "elohim" and the inside is "metatron"... Mmm, cabalistic humor.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
Cool suggestion. (Score:2)
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Junk Food Convention (Score:2)
In another part of the company they started naming machines after planets, which was okay until they got to Uranus... It leads to questions like: "Where's Pluto? -- Over by Uranus!"
hehehe
Titles mean nothing (Score:2)
I work (well, am actually a member of) an LLC with a very flat management structure. All of the technical people have the job title of "Systems Engineer" whether we program, manage the telecom system, the LAN, or the WAN. Since most of us wear multiple hats, anything more specific would be deceptive anyway. "Glorified Computer Nerd" would probably be more accurate (and would probably help to weed out perspective employees who are humor impaired if put on one's resume), but even that would be too specific, as some of us manage the phone system as well.
Titles really aren't that meaningful -- any smart employer is going to pay much more attention to the job description, and descriptions of past projects, when looking over resumes, than the job title. I still can't believe people will actually accept job title upgrades/changes in liue of a raise -- indeed, I wouldn't have believed it at all if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, at a previous job. Personally, I work for money, not prestige. My good luck that I was able to make a hobby a career, and really enjoy what I do, and as long as the pay is right, I don't care if they call me "Systems Engineer" or "Computer Custodian".
PS - I like your naming convention!
Keep fighting the good fight! (Score:2)
Our naming convention is to name all Windows boxes after dinasaurs (guess why?), all sun workstations and servers after stars (ok, that's kind of boring, but millionair names kept getting more and more diffuclt to come up with and spell, even if you do have to be one to own one of those machines yourself), linux boxes after countries, with some exceptions for firewall, routers, and the like
Of course, since I define that stuff, I'm free to change it at will. The names do sound reasonably professional, and only insiders really understand why that flakey NT box, due to be phased out soon, is called stegosaurus.
Re:The normal standard... (Score:2)
Generals and Stars (Score:2)
Personally, I feel that since we are an international company, something more universal would be appropriate. I favor celestial bodies. Pick the scale depending on the network size (server count).
Stars if there are many servers, planets if there are few. This also works well with constellations, Greek/Roman mythology... Then go Assyrian, Egyptian, Hindu, Norse.
Ancient religions are particularly apropos for global (or multi-OS) companies, since they can suggest the geographical location of the server (or divvy up the servers thematically by OS), as well as denoting their function. You may have to do some digging to find the name of the Egyptian messenger god for your North African SMTP server, but it's a learning experience, and you'll never forget it. A firewall named Charon is cool as hell, as is a web server named Arachne...
You're absolutely right. Cryptic, machine server names take the joy out of it. The network naming conventions should reflect the personality of it's handlers and of the organization they serve.
naming conventions rock (Score:2)
cities (Score:2)
We're a communications and navigations manufacturer, so we chose cities. Toronto, Berlin, etc... The entertaining part (for geeks like me) is when the names mean something. Here's a quick list of some of the better ones:
Alexandria -- web server
Pergamum -- backup web server
Istanbul -- e-commerce server
Chernobyl -- test Netware box
Shiloh -- test AS/400 box
and my favorite (although not very PC, it seems that most everyone can take a joke)
Dresden -- firewall
Of course, Rockwell's firewall is asbestos - pretty hard to top that.
I've also used classical composers and great authors for names. Gives you an ego kick when someone asks "Who the hell is Kafka?"
Re:Some principles for machine naming (Score:2)
I generally do manual-cname for things like 'mail'. I point the name at the right box, but I don't use a CNAME, or I wouldn't be able to use it as an MX.
But, I *do* give the machine a "real" name that reflects the box, not the job.
Oak + Ash = Welsh Steganography (Score:2)
A much more global, understandable, and useful convention than "Xmen", whatever they are. And if you're into offending the politically correct, it's also a way to suggest the scandalous idea that white folks might have an ethnic heritage.
--Charlie
Some of mine (me too! :-) (Score:2)
Only fools and horses characters (brit slant, but very amusing)
Philosophers - lots of long names though
Plaid and Boards of Canada song names.
Local stars - eridani, tau_ceti etc. etc.
Gnu people - richard, eric etc. etc.
random latin - keeps the PHBs happy.
and my personal favorite: porn stars!
I think the thought police are after me though - I was thinking a couple of days ago how cool it would be to swap naming conventions on
Machines change. CNAMEs remain. (Score:2)
Machines (and their names) come and go. Use CNAME records to indicate a machine's functionality. Make "SQL1" a CNAME that points to "Goofy" today, and "Cyclops" tomorrow after you upgrade.
What is RFC2100? The link is a 404. (Score:2)
Names (Score:2)
Back to work then; I will be naming workstations too, and there I'm thinking of a general theme per room such as a book and the computers having names from that theme or book. For the servers, I'm giving them more descriptive names that explains what the computer is and does. Some examples are crash-and-burn which actually COULD be a Win98 station with a CD-RW, but it's in fact the name I use for installations I work with, play with, throw in the floor and in general aren't very nice too. The server which will hold the WinNT profiles is ofcourse named profiler and my laptop to which I tunnel an IP-number to whereever I am is called circuitous-route.
Few Ideas. (Score:2)
Saturday Night Live Names:
Garth, Wayne, Carsenio, Churchlady, Landshark, Hans, Frans, etc.
Simpsons:
Homer, Marge, Smithers, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, MrBurns, etc.
Star Wars:
Luke, Leia, Han, Jabba, Anakin, C3PO, R2D2, Biggs, ObiWan, etc.
Really anything that has a lot of neverending names work well. These three we feel here work best and will always have some new name, even when you think they ran out.
Related (Score:2)
-cpd
rfc2100 (Score:2)
Also, the company i work for has a customer who named all of their boxes after sesame street characters. You'd think it'd be easy , but try and name 10 of 'em...after you get past the big birds and oscars, you end up spending hours trying to figure out the name of the garbage man (bruno)..
Settle on a name length (Score:2)
My experience as a sysadmin (was Good Time back then) is that everything is prettier if you use a fixed name length, 5 chars is a good choice. It helps you having well formatted config and log files, thus making sysadmin tasks easier.
hope this helps
A+
Our scheme... (Score:2)
This sounds dull, but we have machines like tumulus, potato, hackness, scratch and scar.
We haven't yet used "Hole of Horcum" or "Lower Bell End" but one day they will take their place alongside Dismantled, and Danger Area.
Zwack (on Claymoor, as I'm Scottish)
Re:That xmen link is to a PORN SITE!!! (Score:2)
BTW, the real marvel comics x-men [marvelcomics.com] site is here.
Farm animals (Score:2)
The firewall is, of course, called goat. Goats eat everything. The firewall . . . well . . . :-)
The webserver (static content) is called sheep. Because sheeps are pretty unexciting creatures. And when you think about it, once everything is up and running webservers aren't that exciting either.
The NT domino server is named Ox, because of its elegance and speed. The other NT server doesn't have an animal name, but it is called Blimp in honor of the size of the OS that runs on it.
The mail exchange is called cow. Since cows basically munch grass all day, and "cow" does the same for mail.
Those sound like GREAT names... (Score:2)
Actually, it makes sense...because they used to call Titanic unsinkable, whereas HP sells the "unstoppable" Windows NT!
Re:Boring/Hideous Female names (Score:2)
You can expect to hear from my sister too.
Love
Molly.
Re:Rockets scientists and job title rant. (Score:2)
People getting a CNE or MCSE and calling themselves engineers. It's not their fault. It's obvious whose fault it is.
As an engineering student I was always told it was illegal to say that you were an engineer if you really weren't.
To be an engineer... I think that if you are eligible for entry in an engineering association (such as IEEE for all the EEs) as a full engineer, only then are you an engineer.
Working on it... (Score:2)
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Grateful Dead Songs! (Score:2)
"Turn it on, and leave it on!"
And for all the people buying RedHat stock, "Estimated-Profit", naw, too long.
Maybe Samson and Delilah for a PDC and backup DC.
ObMSTroll: For NT, helena-bucket.
George
Re:H.P. Lovecraft rules! (Score:2)
And you can name your NT server Necromonicon, because understanding it inside and out will drive you insane.
George
Re:Dead rock stars (Score:2)
Maybe naming a DEC server John, well, it used to big a decade or so again, but no one's heard of him since.
Or naming an old 486 festooned with SCSI cards and extra drives and such Jerry. It's old, it's cumbersome, but it keeps on truckin'.
A NeXT server named StevieRay, lots of potential, but died way too young.
George
Wintermute, and Grateful Dead songs (Score:2)
For my PC's at home, I use the names of Grateful Dead songs.
My IBM PC330 I named Liberty. A catchy little thing, but with few prospects for expansion (3 slots, 3 drive bays, feh!).
I named the Cyrixed 486 I bought for $5 at a garage sale Deal, though only runs for a few days before the hardware makes it crash. It's due for a motherboard replacement.
I named the Dell 486 I bought at a garage sale ( I overpaid, but I had little time and I desperately needed a running server) Terrapin, becuase it keeps going, and going, and going ( you need to have seen the Dead do Terrapin Station live to appreciate this).
I still have a P90 to put together, maybe I'll name it Dark Star, since right now it's apart, in formless pieces of matter.
George
Re:Employee Title Naming Conventions (Score:2)
I've also seen "Speaker to Teletypes" and "Head Robot Wrangeler" in people's .sigs.
Re:rfc2100 (Score:2)
Re:lack of imagination (Score:2)
Dr.MarvinMonroe or Mrs.Lovejoy."
Ours too, it was great. You could log into Krusty and next you would be Chief Wiggum, and Troy McClure. We may have also had Itchy and Scratchy.
Dilbert (Score:2)
Dilbert
Dogbert
etc...
Re:Clever--or Simple? (Score:2)
Re:Computer Naming (Score:2)
Re:Some principles for machine naming (Score:2)
Creative naming schemes are fun when your environment is small. They don't scale though. There are times when it's nice to be able to grep the NIS hosts map for a pattern and know you just tagged every machine in the env running Solaris 2.6 on SuperSparc architectures.
-AutumnLeaf
Naming Conventions (Score:2)
They've also grouped some of the sun workstations by planet. I'm in the mars group, they've also got saturn, mercury, etc...
I personally would name my machines after bad weather - lightning, thunder, blizzard, cyclone, tornado, hail, hurricane. Though I was naming my x-terms after Djinns/Efreets from Magic: The Gathering. Juzam, Mahamoti, etc...
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Re:Some principles for machine naming (Score:2)
There's another, more important reason why your server names should not reflect their functionality. It's a security issue; you don't want intruders to understand your network architecture at first glance by just looking at the names of the servers.
"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"
Re:Server names I'm planning on ... (Score:2)
Gave that man a virtual Weizenbier, put it on my tab.
Got a twenty-seven B stroke six?
Server names I'm planning on ... (Score:2)
I'll buy a virtual beer for whoever figures out the reference of the second list.
what about Borg names (Score:2)
e.g. you can call your SQL servers 1of3 2of3 and 3of3
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Re:Cheese, the man, why (Score:2)
telnet swaledale-with-old-peculier
or
ping venezualan-beaver-cheese
Of course, edam is short and simple, as is yarg (from Cornwall). I'd recommend the Monty Python cheese shop sketch for a good (if somewhat out of date) list of cheeses.
HH
Re:Name after fast food (Score:2)
Re:I've noticed... (Score:2)
(For those not familiar with Lovecraft's pantheon of Elder Gods, Yog-sothoth was one of the more powerful of the Elder and had many shapes in which he/it would appear.)
Although I personally haven't stuck to any specific grouping for machines on my home network. Although most come from some sort of literature or fiction, there's no set pattern: cydonia, binky, yog-sothoth, zorak, vargas.... If I try to keep in a particular "category" of naming, I always wind up running out of names.
I overwhelmingly agree that "real" names should be associated with computers rather than some sort of symbol. One of our clients decided to name all the machines in their office by what phone extension they were sitting next to. Needless to say that in the year or so I've been there, all machines have moved offices many times and new machines have replaced olf machines and I lose more hair and the B.P. goes up another ten points every time that happens. Can't convince them to change the naming scheme, though....
-=-=-=-=-
German WW2 Divisions (Score:2)
The elite Pz Divisions for the big iron, such as Liebstandarte, Das Reich and Totenkopf.
Then there are a number of second line Pz Divisions, as well as several Panzer Grenadier Division for support boxes.
Then there are a number of specialist units such as 12th SS Pz Div Hitler Jugend - the young and reckless box (test environment).
Lastly there are a number of foreign legion divisions such as Galacia, Wiking, etc, etc.
The wonderous thing about this scheme is that each Division has a unique number (which all computer staff have to be familiar with of course), which you can use for unique number in the IP address scheme !!!
Once this has been done, you can then name development projects after towns in Russia and re-live Barbarossa all over again ...
For weekly meetings, make sure that your development staff all attend in period costume, each divisional 'General' in turn can snap to attention, deliver their report in short and sharp tones, and then click their heels loudly ...
You should see the look of total puzzlement on management's faces when you conclude your weekly activity reports with - 'Ve have trapped Die Bolschevisten in the Kharkov pocket and 3rd SS Pz Das Reich vill smash them by the end of ze veek ... Sieg Heil !!!'
You can of course change the subject matter if not being completely PC is more to your liking .. In another company that I know of, the IT manager turned up to the board meeting dressed as Cortez, (complete with conquistador helmet) with his retinue dressed as Catholic priests and inquisitors ..
When concluding his report, he pounded his fist onto the table and declared that 'By months end, the Toltec empire will be ours, and by the Grace of God, the gold of the Mayan temples would be sailing forwith for Spain ! - Long Live His Majesty !'
A rose by any other name.... (Score:2)
Dos and Don'ts! (Score:2)
First, never *ever* name the computers after the function they do (e.g. Billing, Accounting, Support, Engineering, ...etc.) nor by the people that are using them (JohnB, GregC, ...etc.
Companies and divisions get merged or eliminated and you have to live with the misnomer. Also people move on, and name stays. We had a printer called Hashmi after the guy left the office (and eventually the whole company) for YEARS...
Also, never name the machines by their vendor, serial number, model, ...etc. Anyone remembers the machine called VAX somewhere in the UUCP mail days, and it got replaced by a Sun, but was still called VAX?
Some nice themes include:
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Re:Some principles for machine naming (Score:2)
Tim Gaastra
Logical Names - the Answer (Score:3)
Let's say you have the "logical" name of Linux2214pc. Does that "tell" you what it does? Nope. Does it say what Linux extensions it has? Nope. Does it tell you what software is installed? Nope. Will it remain valid, after the next kernel patch is installed? Nope.
Now, I -do- logically name kernels, by what additional patches are in there. Now, I don't -have- to, but it's handy. I could -equally- use names of characters (real or imaginary) that symbolise those same characteristics.
Now, I'm going to turn the question around. Which is more "logical"? A name that has no permanent, derived connection with the machine, or a name which symbolises the very essence of what's there?
IMHO, the answer is simple. It's actually =ILLOGICAL= to name computers after OS versions, location on a network, or some other transitory feature. You move the machine, install a security patch, or add some capability, and the name becomes invalid. That is not logical. YOUR name doesn't become invalid, every time you read a book or move house! Why should a computer's?
What IS logical is to choose a name which symbolises the essence of what you're going to do with the computer. This will be far less subject to change than mere physical location. If I pick the name "Gandalf" for a computer, the chances are it's NOT going to be for word-processing. Most people know a newspaper is a place to turn for information, so a server called "ThePress" or "Tabloid" is readily identified for what it does.
I know, dull corporations prefer dull names. However, all is not lost. Either alias or multihome your servers. eg: Use a STABLE, SYMBOLIC name as the principle name, and use the unstable, lacklustre, corporate name as an alias. That way, you (and other general users) can know what's where, and the bosses can be happy, all at the same time.
(Sadly, I doubt many exec's would comprehend the benefits of compromise, like this.)
Beer! (Score:3)
SMP 450Mhz workstation is "Porter"
200Mhz gateway is "Lager"
133Mhz laptop is "Weizen"
486sx-25 laptop is... "Lite"
Maybe someday I can afford a "Stout" - or even "Barleywine!"
:)
Cool names are very well, but.. (Score:3)
Just a few thoughts from a few years of working in academia, the land of interesting names. My last department had machines named after... characters in "Robin Hood" (guess where), cartoon characters, racing drivers, racing circuits, sleazy politicians, participants in royal scandals, priests, fruits beginning with "p", characters from "Red Dwarf", famous traitors, emotions, and.. and.. different naming schemes for different labs or groups. As well as being interesting and varied, this has the added advantage of knowing exactly where a machine is once you know how the schemes work, which isn't as easy when all you have to go on is a random number like "sun0195".
And last but not least, rainstorming for machine names is a great way to liven up a dull meeting.
Re:Soviet Leaders (Score:3)
Now that I think of it, though, it makes sense. If Boris Yeltsin is naming his servers after all his prime ministers, then every time he gets a new box he's got to change PMs.
Wanna precipitate another crisis in Russia? Send Boris a laptop.
This is why I snagged lly.org (Score:3)
So far out of that list I've used frantica, maxima, abnorma, awfu, musica, termina, fata, norma, individua, geographica, idea, and sexua.
The possibilities are endless.
Multiple Naming Schemes and Scheme Choices (Score:3)
1: Every functional machine type (firewall, app server, DB server, communication server, personal) gets a theme. If you are feeling cute enough, the themes are related (like mammals/fish/insects/birds). In most places, machines don't change functional groups often: once a machine is installed as a database server, it will never serve as anything but a database server.
2: Every machine gets a name based on its group theme. This is the canonical name of the box.
3: If those in power want to use machine-understandable names, make them the canonical names. Then take theme names and bind them to the machine-understandable names, so that HP102x is always, say, Everest, no matter what else happens to the machine. The theme name will likely become the canonical name in everyday speech.
4: Machines get functional names based on their current function. The second mail server gets the name mail_2 or somesuch. This is a secondary name. If the box gets reassigned as a Web server, it gets renamed www_2 or somesuch.
4a: Personal machines (desktops, laptops, Palm Pilots, Dreamcasts...) get a functional name based on their primary user (usually username). If people get multiple computers, they get prefixes or suffixes. Thus, I could have a Linux machine named l_remande, and an NT machine called n_remande. Resist the temptation to make the username name the canonical name; the machine has to get renamed when its primary user leaves your operation, and that often happens more often than computers obsolescing.
The username name is more important than it sounds. People will forget the canonical names of each others' machines (because you never use them), but need to know them to fix them. If I am told that Mary's machine has a problem, I don't have to guess whether I have to log into "mako" or "bluefin", I just log into "mary".
5: When setting up a resource farm (where people can access one of many machines), make sure that all the names are easy to remember and easy to type. At WPI, there was a lab full of DECStations that all answered to things from Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension. Most of the load was on "yaya"; little of it went onto boxes like "planet_10" or "bigboote". The problem was that lazy users saved keystrokes with "telnet yaya", and you don't risk misspelling "bigboote". Elsewhere on campus, it was worse: a math lab had machines named after mathemeticians. Everybody logged onto "godel" and "newton"; I don't even remember the names of the other boxen.
6: Side note: in-jokes work. In the aforementioned Banzai lab, one of the DECStations was still down as the students arrived. By the time it was repaired and booted, it got the name "realsoon". One user at another site had three computers, and the theme was artificial intelligence: he had "huey", "dewey", and "louie" (from Silent Running, not Disney).
7:Good themes share some common attributes. They should have a large, if not infinite, range of names (name them after states, and you can only run fifty machines). The theme should either be extremely obvious (like many nature themes), or be easy to gain context on. Buckaroo Banzai isn't too bad, as you can rent the video: cult movie characters are worse, as you would have to rent a lot of movies to get the joke. People's names are bad: names strange enough not to conflict with the user base are often too strange to remember or type.
These are all internal naming conventions. External names should be different.
The worst misnomer (Score:3)
We couldn't figure out what happened for a while, until someone typed the command:
telnet xb
And got back something to the effect of:
telnet: cannot connect to 0.0.0.11
Telnet had read xb, not as a machine name, but as a hexidecimal IP address!
It quickly became xblb (Xenix Build Lab), solving the problem.
Soviet Leaders (Score:3)
Josef
Leonid
Yuri
Maxim
Vladimir
and Leon (Trotsky) is coming soon.
--
Max V.
easy to name the X server... (Score:4)
"What's the average uptime for Viagra?"
"How long has he been on Crack?"
"LSD seems to make the network act funny."
Read the RFC... (Score:4)
Some principles for machine naming (Score:5)
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 (Score:5)
Hindenburg
Titanic
Challenger
Spruce Goose
TowerofPiza
Cubs
What happens over time. (Score:5)
- 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.
- 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.
- The first sys admin is hired. He follow my lead and creates hamlet, prospero, lear, and falstaff.
- 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.
- Seeing "macfly" his assistant goes with the "taglines from 80's teen movies" naming scheme, and makes the next machine bueller.
- I don't know what comes next.
I may have forgotten a few.RFC 2100 (Score:5)
Paul.