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.
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Date: 2003-11-05 11:09 pm (UTC)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.