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Server Naming Conventions?
from the never-run-out-of-tolkien-characters dept.
The reader continues:
"Here's a few ideas we've been tossing around, using Joe's Deli as an example:
- [four letter "name"][two letter service type][2 numbers]
eg) jdelwb03.domain.com
+ easy to determine the function and name
- hard to remember and pronounce, once you run out of four
character servers, determining the name and function will be
difficult. Joe's Deli and John's Delivery will have conflicting
names
- [random combination of numbers and letters]
eg) ak1jop3d.domain.com
+ none really
- confusing.. really confusing. Can you imagine saying to someone
"log on to alpha kappa one john omikron peter three delta?"
- [theme based name]
name servers based on a theme, eg Gundam
eg) zaku.domain.com, gelgoog.domain.com
+ easily identifiable - all Gundam names belong to Joe's Deli,
easy to pronounce and remember
- hard for a new tech or management (why would they need to know?)
to associate to a server
"I'd like to know what others in the tech community use for server naming policies when planning large scale data centres. Also, with data centres located nationally, does the naming convention pose any problems? Thanks."
Seven Dwarfs? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Seven Dwarfs? (Score:5, Funny)
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Remainder? (Score:4, Funny)
If you had stuck with the word "answer" you would have been fine. But you had to try to look smart and look where that got you! Modded up as funny, while making a simple mistake yourself!
If I were clever, I would leave a clever comment here.
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And after seven... (Score:5, Funny)
The two I remember were "sleazy" and "scuzzy".
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Re:And after seven... (Score:3, Funny)
It's spelled SCSI.
--
Evan
Re:No... (Score:5, Funny)
Sleepy was killed in 1968 when he accidently drove off a cliff (most people who know Sleepy dispute the police report that indicated alcohol was to blame).
Sneezy died of natural causes in 1973 (pollen counts were extremely high that year).
Happy and Dopey were found dead in a hotel room in 1982 of an aparent heroin overdose.
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Naming Conventions. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Naming Conventions. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a student at Stanford, and one of my profs set up a lab a couple years back where each of the workstations was a logical operation. And, Xor, Nand, Or, Iff, etc.
The server was called "gates", because each of these is a logic gate.
Then, Bill Gates donated money and there was going to be a Gates Computer Science building.
Needless to say, my prof lost his name pretty damn quickly, and old Bill was relented to.
Parent
Re:Naming Conventions. (Score:4, Informative)
Personally, I named my home servers "riffraff", "columbia", my laptop "eddie", my palmtop "sadie", and so on. My work servers are "ritz", "tim", "susan", etc. For those of you who get it, it's a pretty simple naming scheme, and for those who don't, the work ones are respectable, non-geeky at a glance, and easy to remember.
For large numbers of computers, name them by department and number. Or location and number. Room/cube numbers seem like a good idea until you start swaping offices and cubes. Best off keeping the numbers semi-random so you don't expect anything, and just log where they are/their name in your asset management software. A system moving inter-department/location will have to be wiped. Period. Easier to track software licenses anyway (especially if each department has a seperate software budget). If you've set up your users correctly, all their files are on the server, anyway. Don't use "Four character and number" or something like that. No reason to say MKEC4711 when it can just be marketingeastcoast-4711. YMMV depending on legacy systems you have to chat with or through.
--
Evan "Back in my day, we walked around the office looking at the back of each computer for the ring that fell out of the token network. And we *liked* it".
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Element names work well for a small low-order net (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n (Score:5, Funny)
What did he choose?
Immodium.
That still cracks me up - (thanks, Dave!)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
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Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n (Score:5, Funny)
BORON
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Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n (Score:4, Funny)
I like elements though, very clever!
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Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I favor naming them after scientists - this is what 95% of the world's laboratories in every field do. The two computers in my dad's lab are Watson and Crick (he doesn't even work with DNA). Substitute other sorts of famous people; presidents, athletes, whatever.
The anime characters are good, if that's what people in your group can remember. One lab I was in that had a lot of computers used deities; Linux were Hindu deities, NT were Greek, and Irix were Egyptian. We added a Mac (OS X) which I named Arawn (Welsh deity).
With 200 machines, you're gonna run out of pet names really fast, so I think you'd need to assign a whole new category of names to each busines, so Joe's Delivery could get Rolling Stones songs, and John's Delicatessen could get war criminals. That would be cool, and that way any administrative subdivisions could use naming conventions that they were good at remembering.
Oh! I have an idea, you could assign each company a word (Winter and Dog, say) and name every computer associated with that company that word, in a different language. All of the web-servers could be french (Hiver and Chien?), the POP servers spanish (Invierno and Perro) and so forth.
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Just to annoy the RIAA (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just to annoy the RIAA (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just to annoy the RIAA (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Just to annoy the RIAA (Score:5, Funny)
Phrasing is everything.
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Re:Just to annoy the RIAA (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder what it means that my first thought was "the servers named Britney and J-Lo have stopped functioning" and it took almost a full 10 seconds before I realized the other meaning...
Damn, I need to get out more...
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alphanumeric dotted quad (Score:5, Interesting)
This lets you distinguish between the server number in a rotation (the second element) and the specific service it is supporting (the first element).
Subdomain by function (Score:5, Insightful)
Skip the themes for individual server names. You can use themes for DNS subdomains, but you don't need to actually name the "gemini" server group *.gemini.foo.com, but you can call the *.g.foo.com server group the gemini group.
You don't need to throw any reference to the operating system in the DNS name. If you replace a server with one from a different OS (like you migrate your database from HPUX to AS/400 or Linux), then you have to run around to several places and change the DNS name that other boxes point to. It also allows you to cluster mixed operating systems (good for reliability), and to transition from one OS to the other.
Finally, name your servers numerically as you add them to each sub-function group. Old servers that are slow and coming off lease soon will have lower numbers than higher ones. Just start with A0000001 for the first one in each domain, and go. If there are too many servers starting with A, then be slightly redundant and have the first letter of the server name match the single-letter subdomain. The first DNS server would be d00000001.d.foo.com.
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Government conspiracies (Score:5, Funny)
Why stick to just one domain? (Score:4, Insightful)
Check the RFC (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Check the RFC (Score:3, Interesting)
Of historical interest, from the RFC (written in 1990): "Extremely well-known hostnames such as 'sri-nic' and 'uunet' should be avoided since they are understood in conversation as absolute addresses even without a domain." I consider myself a bit of an old-timer, but though I recognize uunet, I've never even heard of sri-nic. I'm sure someone knows about this; please inform!
Re:Check the RFC (Score:3, Informative)
The accessibility of distributed resources carried with it the need for an information service (either centralized or distributed) that enables users to learn about those resources. This was recognized at the PI [ed. Primary Instigators] meeting in Michigan in the spring of 1967. At the time, Doug Engelbart and his group at the Stanford Research Institute were already involved in research and development to provide a computer-based facility to augment human interaction. Thus, it was decided that Stanford Research Institute would be a suitable place for a "Network Information Center" (NIC) to be established for the ARPANET. With the beginning of implementation of the network in 1969, construction also began on the NIC at SRI."
The Stanford Research Institute's Network Information Center (SRI-NIC) became the responsible authority for maintaining unique host names for the Internet. The SRI-NIC maintained a single file, called hosts.txt, and sites would continuously update SRI-NIC with their host name to IP address mappings to add to, delete from, or change in the file.
This was the first semi-distributed name resolution on the Internet. You all understand that eventually the hosts file became too big and led to the development of BIND (DNS Service).
Re:Check the RFC (Score:5, Informative)
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Boot Up! (Score:5, Funny)
B:Which server?
A:Up.
B:Up who?
A:The server.
B:Which?
A:Boot up.
B:Boot up what server?
A:No no what server should stay up!
B:I don't know.
A:No no that's our web server.
B:Your web server is "I don't know"?
A:Yes. But nevermind, we need to boot up.
B:What server?
A:What server should stay up.
B:I'm ASKING YOU THAT! WHAT SERVER SHOULD STAY UP?
A:Certainly.
B:Oh at last! So certainly should stay up. Ok, so I should boot what server?
A:No no no, what server should stay up!
B:Certainly.
A:OK, so now boot up!
B:AAAAARGH! What does that server do?
A:It's a mail server.
B:So, what you get mail what server does it say in the headers it's from?
A:No no, what server's our web server. It says it's from up.
B:What do you mean up? Mail can't come from up!
A:It can if it's our mail server.
B:You're mail server is called "it" and it should boot it up?
A:No no no! It's our DNS server! We should be booting up!
B:So we should be booting it up?
A:No. We should be booting up.
B:THAT'S WHAT I SAID!
...
Parent
No no no... (Score:5, Funny)
AD87D0A9S8D90A9D80AD90ASD8A0D80F0A80D8F0AASD3
if that isn't easy to remember I don't know what is!
Don't name the machines after what they do (Score:5, Insightful)
My company is an example of extremely stupid behavior. We have desktop machines named jsmithw2knyc. Anytime the machine is reassigned to another person, moved from office to office, or changes operating systems, the hostname and DNS must be updated. It's silly.
That's what CNAMES are for (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, we have our servers named after the characters from Cheers - norm, diane, cliff, lillith, etc.
We also have functional names - smtp, pop3, dns, etc.
Now, in the DNS records, we have:
smtp CNAME cliff
pop3 CNAME cliff
dns CNAME norm
As a result, the clients are configured to send mail to smtp, get mail from pop3, but that is mapped into cliff. If we move outbound mail to norm, we just change the cname.
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Re:That's what CNAMES are for (Score:4, Informative)
Problem solved.
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Close to home (Score:3, Interesting)
For my little network at the home office I use the original (pre- annexation) names of streets in the neighborhood.
My wife thinks this is cool because she loves local history.
I think it's cool because I get to use names like maple, kuchle, liberty, newburgh, and columbus. Only the real old-timers from the hood get it. They enjoy knowing a little something about computers that younger people don't, even though it's totally non-technical.
As a practical matter, it's a nearly inexhaustible "theme" category; as you need more names, just reach out to a larger radius. In a decent-sized city you'll need a full Class C to max out the theme.
Naming Conventions (Score:5, Interesting)
At the company I work at, we have ~5000 servers worldwide, and they all follow the same naming convention:
Thus, a production server in Minneapolis, Minnesota would be usmnminpsnnn , or a development server in Vancouver, BC, would be cabcvandsnnn .
Re:Naming Conventions (Score:5, Interesting)
I think snnn.ps.min.mn.us.company.com will look way better.
Parent
Re:Naming Conventions (Score:3, Funny)
9A962BCC-97E0-4268-ABD4-FB5E7236DF64
AAEBD785-B9CB-405c-A09A-91719C979626
DDDFB01E-5979-454f-BE1E-175453F52127
Etc.
Then its sort of like remembering phone numbers. What, you can't rememberize 4000+ phone numbers? Then you buy ACT! or some other contact management software. Then you set up contact reminders to make you remember to ping the server to make sure its alive or back it up. Your reminder list probably wouldn't be more than a few hundred entries on each day. You could polish that off before lunch. Then ask for a raise because you solved the problem without doing hardly any work! Thats reusability, and they pay people a lot to be good at it you know.
i've worked in a similar environment (Score:5, Interesting)
Two conventions I like: (Score:4, Interesting)
convention is a nice shortcut when a script
kiddie is portscanning.
2. Naming conventions. (I.e. name the
Web server "Tolkein-Place-Names", the
mail server "Famous-Composers", et cetera.)
the ways I've seen it done.. (Score:3, Redundant)
customer-01.jfk.foo.net
Worked fairly well. We used the code for the closest airport for the geography portion. Also served to make dns adminning a mite prettier. Course that provides you're not against overly specific domain names. The '01' could also be replaced with significant letters for certain machines. customer-fw, for example, would be customer's firewall.
A more bureaucratic approach that we did at another job combined the theme idea with the department name. This works in a place where there are lot of computing divisions that have their own little kingdom of machines. Like where I work, we're known as "D0". Thus, we call our machines d0nut, d0mino, d0om, you get the idea.
We also have an unofficial series system that borrows on the idea, d0lx001 is d0's first linux node. Again, it works well for the scope it's been defined for.
I wager a nicely scalable system could be built using a combination of my two examples. If your machines have limits on hostname length, check on the limits of dns heirarchy. They may allow finer granularity.
For small organizations (under 20 machines, not counting workstations), theme oriented works just fine.
be sensible (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I'd encode them using one or two characters to denote the platform ( i = intel, s = sun, h = hp, blah blah). Then use the additional characters to denote room, rack, etc etc. If you're allowed to use sub domains that makes your life much easier.
Maybe I'm over pragmatic
If you absolutely have/want to use 'friendly' names. Give your machines multiple names..... the pretty one, and the ugly sensible one so you can easily map between the two when you have to.
I hate to use it as an example --- but look at Hotmail when you log in. They are using subdomains and strict naming conventions for there servers. It's the only sensible thing to do..... unless you're trying to guarantee youself job security (and if thats the case and I was your boss and I found out i'd fire your ass for being a moron).
Re:be sensible (Score:5, Interesting)
That's stupid. Now if I move the server from one rack space to another, or upgrade it to a different platform then all my users have to change the config on any applications that reference the server? Not a long term scalable solution.
Keep location and platform information in a seperate document or database. Or create HINFO records in DNS.
Parent
What I used (Score:3, Interesting)
We had fights with management wanting names like MAIL01, MAIL02, etc. but I bit them down when I told them that if one server type ever got above 100 then it would be a bitch or over 1000, etc.
Upper management liked the scheme cause when they would show clients the server rooms they would see these great literature references on the boxes which made us look inteligent. Win + Win.
3 Rules of Device Taxonomy (Score:3, Insightful)
Michael's 3 Rules of Device Taxonomy:
Sheesh people, use subdomains (Score:5, Informative)
The LIRR homepage is http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/lirr/. The LIRR is run by the MTA, which is located in NYC, which is a city in NY, which is located in the US. Perfect scheme, and a suprisingly decent application of DNS. Especially for government.
So why suffer with jdeli342.domain.com? Why not a.jdeli.domain.com, b.jdeli.domain.com, etc? In addition to allowing for easier delegation of services, you can set search orders in /etc/resolv.conf so you can simply type ``ssh b'' to hop from host a to host b. That's just golden.
Some other examples..
Mail Exchangers
Nameservers
Web servers
And so on. If you get to z, make the next one aa, and then ab, etc.
Also, functional names should not replace cute names. DNS allows you to assign more than one name to a machine. If a machine is repurposed for another ask, it should still be known by its unique cute name no matter where it goes. At the same time, a single host can have more than one functional name.
No reason barney.domain.com can't also be bc.web.domain.com and e.porn.domain.com. :)
A source of cute names? Oh, uhm, right now I use Roman empererors. There were tons of them.
Mary, call them all Mary (Score:4, Funny)
Re:themes are good (Score:4, Funny)
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Much too complicated! (Score:3, Funny)
Far more logical to name as follows:
SRVR1
.
.
.
SRVR4000
It is a simple matter then to hand out a quick-reference pamphlet to your users defining what each server is.
Be sure to order the reference by server name, rather than function or department, as this is how they will be listed in Network Neighborhood. Your users cannot be expected to understand the difference between a print server and a SQL server anyway - no need to confuse them any more than necessary.
(and if you really do this I want a copy of your next performance review! rofl...)
Re:Sci-Fi (Score:3, Funny)
"So, did you install that latest patch on Phoenix?" sounds a lot better than "Updated TTIBDC01 lately?"
Of course, with that many servers, you're better off naming them with random character strings. Here, I'll get you started...
for($i=0;$i<4000;$i++)
$hostname[] = md5(rand(0,(float) microtime() * 10000000));
:D
Re:Instead of Sci-Fi (Score:4, Funny)
It is now named Urectum.
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Re:More themes (Score:5, Funny)
"Hey, would you try DoggyStyle? I can't get in.
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