I've seen myself searching for a compilation like this one time ago.
I miss some other traditional in other locations of the world, but still for me it's a great compilation I just saved for "the next time I see myself searching for it".
Yes; I often direct people to this RFC. Unlike the linked site, the RFC is most useful for its extensive list on what to avoid in a host name. Very good list with all reasoning explained.
That could bite you if you happen to start to work with someone with that name. Therefore, RFC 1178 recommmends not naming hosts using names of people.
What a great set of lists! I had a sudden flashback to the days of the "Beowulf Cluster of X" meme, but in all seriousness, my favorite used to be towns I've lived in or visited, but that too is a bit cumbersome to remember in a pinch sometimes.
These days, I go with colors - I usually get a handy 7 right from the start - so I don't need to dig in too much. I've also gone with desserts or sweets and I'm sure Android was a big inspiration (albeit subconsciously) for that.
Nice! I did this without being aware that it was a good thing to do, and with a small network. I chose Finnish goddess names, some of which got pretty unwieldy...
Perhaps the question 'how do you name your servers?' should be added to tech interviews, the more cutesy the response, the less mature/experienced the interviewee possibly is (i.e. having not been burnt by the obfuscation of such as scheme)?
Renaming machines is a pain, and they inevitably end up with more/different stuff on them than was originally intended, then your "helpful" name like pukweb01 (production, uk, web, 01) is worse than "pikachu" (as it's incorrect).
the correct way to do this is to give the machine a name with no meaning (maybe pikachu, maybe box005) and have a list of the services running on each machine, and use DNS for those (say www1/ns1 that CNAMEs to the actual hostname).
personally, I'd argue that anyone that calls machines things like "pukweb01" has had little to no experience with a rapidly evolving system...
The users of the servers need never be burnt by the cutesy names and can remember them easier. So it seems not so clear cut what's better all things considered, especially as the ratio of users to operations folk increases.
My university used to have their CS lab machines named after breakfast cereals, soups, and pastas. Last year they switched to Unix commands, programming languages, and design patterns.
If I may put forth a slice of my personal philosophy, it's that silly host names have ruled naming conventions long enough. I much prefer boring but logical descriptors that help my network self-document: whether simple codes useful in small environments (like "file01") or more complex schemes suitable for large-scale computing (e.g., "masip150ntvirt" or "cin-me-exch-01"). With the right scheme, 15 characters can tell you a lot about the location, ownership, configuration, and purpose of a particular computer. The cutesy naming conventions do nothing to help admins do their jobs or - in my opinion - actively get in the way.
Or simply have a naming convention for hosts. I realize that only makes sense for sufficiently large setups, but once your setup is large enough, it does make things easier.
At $work we maintain setups for customers, and our FQDNs are roughly <function><counter><environment>.<customer>.<ourdomain>.tld. So the second database server in the testing environment for customer "nasa" (hypothetical, of course) would be called db02t.nasa.<ourdomain>.<tld>.
It does make it pretty obvious from the FQDN what the used is being used for.
It looks like there's two types of answers in this thread, and the difference between them is whether their infrastructure is cloud-based or running in a datacenter:
- Cloud: "Who cares? Name them after pokemon or dinosaurs, you can always reprovision and they won't last very long."
- Datacenter: "But what if the name doesn't make sense 16 months from now??"
uptil I looked at the receipt which had said $9272, I didn't believe that my mom in-law woz realie bringing in money in there spare time on there computar.. there friends cousin haz done this 4 only about eighteen months and recently cleard the mortgage on their place and bourt a great opel. additional info
==========================
We do as well. The NAS is Snorlax, the GPU server is Pikachu, and the workstations are Eevee and Vulpix. I would have named the printer Ditto but apparently IT has a policy on printer names.
This comment is interesting (as well as the other 2 children saying they also use Pokemon for host names), as there has been a study about how kids had fantastic abilities at recognizing Pokemon, but could not achieve the same levels of memorization with flora and fauna:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11924673
This inspired a researcher to create a card game similar to Pokemon, but for our biosphere:
http://phylogame.org/
My old department at the UvA did the same in the past, new sysadmin changed it to European capitol cities. (I'll never lose muscle memory for typing sandshrew and farfetch.) Come to think of it, the DNS server should've been called PokeDex...
(btw, the mail infra consisted only of carebears... I'm looking at YOU J.P.!)
Cute server naming schemes are one of my pet peeves. In my experience the only two logical choices are: sequential numbers (e.g. foo1, ..., foo100, ... if your company name is Foo Corp.), or hashes / uuids (like amazon instance IDs, e.g. i-977a24e3). If you want to give a server a memorable or cute name, use DNS or some kind of alias.
Read the aforementioned RFC - with sequential numbers you are not naming them.
I can imagine how thrilled your colleagues are if they have to ssh into i-977 what was the rest of it?
You might as well just call them "1", "2", and "3". The only time this kind of
naming scheme is appropriate is when you have a lot of machines and there are
no reasons for any human to distinguish between them. For example, a master
computer might be controlling an array of one hundred computers. In this case,
it makes sense to refer to them with the array indices.
When you're starting off with your cute naming scheme, how do you know how many machines you'll manage in the end? Most places I've worked at have hundreds of servers. Using a simple, easy to follow, don't-make-me-think standard from the beginning is the only thing that makes sense IMO.
To give a server a meaningful name, use DNS.
edit: Also, to take your complaint about "i-977.. what was the rest of it?" and turn it around - imagine this scenario: provision 20 new app servers named foo40..foo59 OR provision 20 new app servers and think of 20 cool names to match our existing cool naming scheme of leonardo donatello michaelangelo raphael master-splinter shredder blah blah blah :)
If you don't have some toolset around managing your servers and have to resort to memorizing hostnames, being able to remember hostnames is the least of your problems.
Outgrowing Marvel characters is a sign of good growth. Marvel says they have 7000 characters, and that count might exclude characters that just had one minor appearance.
We reached a point where it was just becoming painful to keep track of them - what a server did and where it was located. When you only have a handful of machines at one location, it's not a big deal. But once that number grows, and especially if spans multiple data centers, cute or geeky naming schemes tend to fall apart.
"Wait, was Magneto the master DB or the NFS server? Did we move DB off there? Is it in Atlanta, or San Francisco, or Phoenix?"
Eventually we reached a point where we had a spreadsheet mapping hostnames to architecture functions and physical locations. We realized that, even though our naming scheme was cool, it wasn't going to scale much further.
186 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadI miss some other traditional in other locations of the world, but still for me it's a great compilation I just saved for "the next time I see myself searching for it".
Thanks.
"Choosing a name for your computer" http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178
Shades of colours, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_blue, are a good, safe source of names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_gray
For a network of 50 computers :)
These days, I go with colors - I usually get a handy 7 right from the start - so I don't need to dig in too much. I've also gone with desserts or sweets and I'm sure Android was a big inspiration (albeit subconsciously) for that.
Renaming machines is a pain, and they inevitably end up with more/different stuff on them than was originally intended, then your "helpful" name like pukweb01 (production, uk, web, 01) is worse than "pikachu" (as it's incorrect).
the correct way to do this is to give the machine a name with no meaning (maybe pikachu, maybe box005) and have a list of the services running on each machine, and use DNS for those (say www1/ns1 that CNAMEs to the actual hostname).
personally, I'd argue that anyone that calls machines things like "pukweb01" has had little to no experience with a rapidly evolving system...
A new job for a machine calls for a new OS install/etc.
At $work we maintain setups for customers, and our FQDNs are roughly <function><counter><environment>.<customer>.<ourdomain>.tld. So the second database server in the testing environment for customer "nasa" (hypothetical, of course) would be called db02t.nasa.<ourdomain>.<tld>.
It does make it pretty obvious from the FQDN what the used is being used for.
- Cloud: "Who cares? Name them after pokemon or dinosaurs, you can always reprovision and they won't last very long."
- Datacenter: "But what if the name doesn't make sense 16 months from now??"
There's something super memorable about Blastoise, Slowbro, Squirtle, Ninetales, Jigglypuff...
I also color my tabs the color of the Pokemon for fast reference.
http://WWW.WORKS23.COM
This inspired a researcher to create a card game similar to Pokemon, but for our biosphere: http://phylogame.org/
ftp://ftp.rpi.edu/etc/hosts
[0] http://www.angelfire.com/mn/Maija/pokemon/pokepack.zip
(btw, the mail infra consisted only of carebears... I'm looking at YOU J.P.!)
To give a server a meaningful name, use DNS.
edit: Also, to take your complaint about "i-977.. what was the rest of it?" and turn it around - imagine this scenario: provision 20 new app servers named foo40..foo59 OR provision 20 new app servers and think of 20 cool names to match our existing cool naming scheme of leonardo donatello michaelangelo raphael master-splinter shredder blah blah blah :)
Myself, I use types of alcohol.
"Wait, was Magneto the master DB or the NFS server? Did we move DB off there? Is it in Atlanta, or San Francisco, or Phoenix?"
Eventually we reached a point where we had a spreadsheet mapping hostnames to architecture functions and physical locations. We realized that, even though our naming scheme was cool, it wasn't going to scale much further.