I worked for a company where naming conventions for the server farm were left to me, so I used Transformers names: jetfire, mudflap, landmine, and so on.
My team came up with using Pixar characters for server names but were told no by the Universities hostmaster. Apparently the University had previously gotten C&D letters from Disney for something similar.
The people who argue against naming machines in an automated fashion don't have hundreds or thousands to manage.
We do something simple: class of machine + number . city.
m1.sjc1 == generic machine in san jose
m2.sjc1 == another generic machine in san jose
db1.ams1 == database class machine in amsterdam
ops1.chi1 == ops class machine in chicago
Very scalable and easy to manage. Custom names are annoying. Your machine management system can tell you what function they serve.
The people who argue against naming machines in an automated fashion don't have hundreds or thousands to manage.
The people who argue that their use case -- regardless of whether it's ten machines or ten thousand machines -- can be generalized into something everyone has to do are the people I try to avoid arguing with.
Right, which is why I didn't do that (unlike the entire point of the URL in the OP, which does that).
I just said that those groups of people don't have hundreds or thousands of machines to manage if they can maintain a custom naming scheme. I didn't say everyone has to do that. All my personal servers are few-lettered women's names. Laura, Amy, Mary, Sara, Christy, etc. To each, their own.
So please don't troll for karma. Especially on Christmas. Especially on HN.
Or maybe I misunderstood your point as being some snippy remark, in which case, sorry.
I don't understand people who insist on appending a 001 postfix to every server name. Firstly, you will most likely never have hundreds of servers fulfilling the same function. Secondly, if you do you will 3 digits may not even be sufficient. So just start with mail, mail2, ... mail10, ... You have files named after servers and "ls" don't show them in numerical order? Use "ls -v". Your management tool don't sort them? Big deal. It's much more painful to have to type "001" the hundreds/thousands of time you will need to ping a server or ssh into it.
Depends on who you are:) We number them with a -01 suffix, and they also have a client name prefix, but each cluster will often have 20-30 servers. Plus it's easy to enable bash auto-complete for ssh/ping/scp based on your known hosts file.
One place I worked at used the seven dwarves as machine names (not that
many machines at that time). I can understand the need to use functional
names where dozens (or hundreds) of servers are accessed by dozens (or
hundreds or thousands) of people.
On my personal network I use ship names from Iain Banks Culture books.
A few years ago a co-worker and I built a system for integrating our company's statements with the post office's online bill payment system. I picked "Brownlee" and "Harris" for the server names after two postal workers that... went postal.
The names stuck for a while until someone high up asked what the names meant. I had to change the names after that :(
At my former company we used car names (yugo, veyron, fetish (yes that's a car), ...) and at some other we used (Slovenian) river names (sava, drava, mura, ...).
Where I work now, we use super heroes (batman, hulk, ironman, ...).
At work, we use our pet names for physical servers, and city names for virtual servers (and my partner always gives me grief over truth-or-consequences). One problem we found is that we now have to maintain a mapping of city names to customers, so moving forward, we're naming our virtual servers after customers.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 58.3 ms ] threadThe periodic table example seems the most useful, as it's roughly the size of a /24.
We do something simple: class of machine + number . city.
Very scalable and easy to manage. Custom names are annoying. Your machine management system can tell you what function they serve.The people who argue that their use case -- regardless of whether it's ten machines or ten thousand machines -- can be generalized into something everyone has to do are the people I try to avoid arguing with.
I just said that those groups of people don't have hundreds or thousands of machines to manage if they can maintain a custom naming scheme. I didn't say everyone has to do that. All my personal servers are few-lettered women's names. Laura, Amy, Mary, Sara, Christy, etc. To each, their own.
So please don't troll for karma. Especially on Christmas. Especially on HN.
Or maybe I misunderstood your point as being some snippy remark, in which case, sorry.
On my personal network I use ship names from Iain Banks Culture books.
scully.domain.com
mulder.domain.com
skinner.domain.com
reyes.domain.com
etc. :)
We have other servers with single roles given "normal" names, such as chat.domain.com and mail.domain.com
The names stuck for a while until someone high up asked what the names meant. I had to change the names after that :(
Mattingly Gooden Puckett Dawson Ripken Gwynn Saberhagen
Where I work now, we use super heroes (batman, hulk, ironman, ...).