pick a fucking name

[rone]

So, we used to have an incredibly obnoxious and cumbersome naming scheme, where the first letter was either S for system or N for network, then a four-digit location code, which started with 1 for East Coast and Europe and 2 for West Coast and Asia-Pacific. Then a 3-letter code that gave a vague hint regarding the machine's function or model, then a 2-digit serial number. Thus, s2009mgw06 is the sixth mail gateway machine at location 2009 (our current colo).

The new and improved naming scheme is: one letter, P for production, D for development, Q for QA; a two-digit location code; a mandatory 3-letter, "vague hint" code; an optional 3-letter supplementary code; and a 2-digit serial number. Thus, p01dnsi03 is the third 'i'nternal DNS server at location 01 (the new colo).

Someone explain to me how the latter is an improvement. I really, really loathe this.

Comments

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Beat them over the head with a copy of this (ftp://blank.org/pub/misc/art_of_automounting.ps). It was a stupid idea 15 years ago; it's a stupid idea now.

[denshi.livejournal.com]

How is this better than the old "each network admin uses [his|her] favorite fantasy series or constellation" naming system?

Where the hell do you work?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Comedy value #1: i used South Park characters for a cluster of servers. kenny died and was taken out of service permanently. Comedy value #2: someone used Monty Python member surnames as hostnames. Note that this creates a host called "idle", which it wasn't until very recently.

Comedy's all well and good, but it doesn't have much place in a professional environment. The problem with using naming groups is that you don't know what a machine does. Is alnitak a Finance box? Is stan the developers' sandbox or an application server? Gilliam has done animation, but gilliam has nothing to do with animation.

So there's a place for a sensible naming scheme that denotes a machine's function. The machine's location has no place in its hostname, because if you move it, you have to rename it; the sole exception is when a machine's location is crucial to its function, and it is therefore unlikely to move and retain its current function (e.g., the printer on the second floor of the 600 Townsend building should be named "print-600t-2"). If you absolutely need to know where the machine is, look at the IP address; the network should tell you where it's located.

If you create a naming scheme that yields hostnames that are more cumbersome to use in print and speech than the corresponding IP address, it is effectively useless (hmm, that sounds almost like an oxymoron). This is what everyone in the Unix group fought for and, evidently, lost.

[kodi]

My favorite example of not being able to tell what a machine does is the machine named "apache" that isn't a webserver.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The article that dr_memory posted argues that arbitrariness with no reference to function is exactly what you want, since functions change too. (It also reminded me that I hadn't set up Ghostscript on my system yet since the last hard drive crash, so now I have again.)

At my office we've got a lot of machines named after gods, heroes and historical figures of antiquity (hera and plato are in my cube), and some others named after comic-book heroes. Typical stuff. And then there are a bunch of other machines that, for reasons I'm not at liberty to go into, have systematic letter-number combinations, and I can never remember the numbers.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Functions can change, but usually that means we're going to rebuild the machine, so you might as well rename it at that point.

I was fine with the notion of naming your desktop whatever the hell you want, but the Desktop cluebies are naming the Windows desktop and laptop machines "usernameNN" because otherwise they're unable to find out which machines are infected with a worm. So i had to give up on that one.

What every company needs is a good database that correlates hostname, function, and location, and is easily accessible and updated. Technically, you can do all that in DNS with HINFO and TXT records, but the front end doesn't exist and would be a bitch. We have something like that, but it's updated by the Sykes helpdesk in Manila, and it's essentially useful only to them.

[jbroughton.livejournal.com]

Remember how long it took for us to get used to the S&N naming scheme? And how we fought it tooth and nail? Then we got used to it...now look what they did to ya'all.

Aaah, the beauty of working in a small hick town with nothing to worry about but a bunch of drunk hicks on the weekends.

Somebody never heard of

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

RFC 1178 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html)? Me neither.