Server Naming Conventions?

Some random reader sent in: "Hi, I'm wondering what others out there use for server naming conventions. Our data centre right now houses a little under 200 servers, with plans to grow up to 4000 servers within the next five years. We'd like to pick something flexible and easy to manage with any tracking system. The servers we'll be implementing include SUN, HPUX, and AIX servers, in addition to existing Compaq and HP Intel servers, so we'll have to adhere to limitations placed on hostnames by manufacturers (ie HPUX lets you have an 8 character hostname)." We had a similar story a few years ago.

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?

[Yoda2]

You could name them after the seven dwarfs, but then I'm not sure what you'd do with the other 3997?

Naming Conventions.

[actappan]

I've always like the idea of naming your systems after your exec staff. Makes rebuilding them kinda fun - and if they're windos boxen - you know that at some point you'll get to reformat your CEO.

Re:Seven Dwarfs?

[graveytrain]

Must be using windows calculator to get that remainder...

Just to annoy the RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

Name them after pop-stars. Hey, Britney is down again. N-Sync has crashed.

Government conspiracies

[0zzymandias]

I like to make my customers think... That's why I have echelon, bigbrother, etc. It's lot's of fun. I have learned to stay away from religious names though. I once had a baptist minister who wondered why a WHOIS on his domain showed his nameserver as Lucifer.

No no no...

[burtonator]

use 128 bit UUIDs... no collision!

AD87D0A9S8D90A9D80AD90ASD8A0D80F0A80D8F0AASD3

if that isn't easy to remember I don't know what is!

Famous People

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering you will have 4000 boxes, I'd suggest using famous people as a naming convention:

einstein
redford
lay

Re:Just to annoy the RIAA

[PugMajere]

Don't you mean, "hey look, Britney is going down again."

Re:Just to annoy the RIAA

[gorehog]

more fun is when segments crash..."Britney an J-Lo are going down on us again."

Phrasing is everything.

Foreman Approach

[Anonymous Coward]

Name them all George. It might confuse hackers.

More themes

[flying_triguy]

World Beers --> Fun to sample the potential names....

PHB "What do you think you're doing"

Lackey "Naming the servers sir, just 3500 more beers to go ..."

LOTR

[coult]

I know! Name them after characters in the Lord of the Rings. All your hax0r friends will think you are cool, hip, and original.

Re:themes are good

[Dark Paladin]

Personally, I've thought about naming servers after sexually transmitted diseases. Imagine walking into a room: "Hey, can you check Syphylis? For some reason AIDS isn't talking to it."

Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n

[flacco]

At my last job, we had ~40 machines in the low order of a class C. We named them after the elements in the periodic table. This gave us an easy naming scheme, and also served as a last-resort DNS system, as the last digit in the machine's IP number was the atomic weight of the element. It was pretty clever.

Yeah, if you're the admin for the local chemistry geek's club. JAYsus.

Re:Just to annoy the RIAA

[flacco]

more fun is when segments crash..."Britney an J-Lo are going down on us again."

To cap it off, play an MP3 rip of some cheesy '70's porn music that you downloaded without paying!

Much too complicated!

[itwerx]

Not to mention none of the users are gonna understand the reference anyway.
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...)

Flashback Humor

[graveytrain]

Michael Jackson and the Seven Dwarfs just went down...?

Remainder?

[John Harrison]

The remainder what is left over after an integer division operation.

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.

Re:Just to annoy the RIAA

[_xeno_]

more fun is when segments crash..."Britney an J-Lo are going down on us again."

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...

Re:Naming Conventions

[Ooblek]

You could also just use GUIDGEN on your local windows box to name your servers:

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.

Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n

[wirefarm]

A good friend of mine was told to pick an element for his machine name at one job, but of course all of the good elements were taken by that time. (Who the hell wants to be Boron, after all...)

What did he choose?

Immodium.

That still cracks me up - (thanks, Dave!)

Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo

Mary, call them all Mary

[Pac]

So you never have a problem remembering their names as with that girl in the restaurant last weekend. Why they have to have different names anyway. So just call them Mary as it should be and add a nice reminder to self about where you last saw the babe, as in MaryFromAccounting, MaryWebServing. You can make the reminders more complex just to help a bit, as in GorgeusMaryWebServing, PlainMaryWebServing.

Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n

[Anonymous Coward]

With my luck, my box would end up being Ununnilium or Ununbium.

Re:Sci-Fi

[Moonshadow]

All of our servers are named after mythological/horoscopic characters/creatures, ie Hercules, Athena, Draco, Aries, Phoenix, etc. Works for us. They were originally given names like TTIBDC01, TTIBDC02, etc. Not only more confusing, it doesn't sound as cool in conversation.

"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

And after seven...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

My wife was expanding a lab with a preexisting "seven dwarves" naming scheme. So she invented some extra dwarves.

The two I remember were "sleazy" and "scuzzy".

Re:Hoth, Naboo, Alderon... oh my

[Anonymous Coward]

That's no moon.

Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n

[j3110]

You mean atomic number right? Or was 2 Deutronium? :) Yep... Deutronium is unstable, it crashed again last night. Something about Deutronium's configuration, I guess. Sounds like this guy needs to invent a few elements. He'll even make it to the coveted Unobtainium. (I wouldn't use this one in hopes that I could get that Quantum computer on the net.) I guess I'm odd for giving them a name based on their function (Web1, web2, db1, db2). My CSC dept. names their servers after birds( Eagle, Hawk, Ospre(doesn't help when you can't spell them)). A friend and I built a cluster, and named it chicken. We even printed a picture and put it on the front to make it easily identifiable.

I like elements though, very clever! :)

Re:Check the RFC

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you just start using the RGB hex. I'm 000088, a nice shade of blue.

Re:Just to annoy the RIAA

[mshowman]

If you are using server blades, name the host machine after a pop star and the individual blades after star wars characters. If one of them breaks, you can call tech support and tell them that "Chewbacca went down on Madonna" or "Yoda went down on Britney". Lame but I think it's funny....

Re:Just to annoy the RIAA

[dan_barrett]

You can also do stuff like "finger @britney"
Hours of fun.

Re:And after seven...

[JabberWokky]

.
It's spelled SCSI.

--
Evan

Re:Just to annoy the RIAA

[flacco]

To cap it off, play an MP3 rip of some cheesy '70's porn music that you downloaded without paying!

(That's strange when your first mod is "-1, Overrated". How can it be overrated if it hasn't been rated yet? Maybe it was done by someone who reflexively mods down anything to do with stealing music?)

Like I said - WITHOUT PAYING! Why pay when you can get music for free off the Internet? There are always new ways of doing it, the record companies and the RIAA can NEVER keep up! Kazaa, AudioGalaxy, Gnutella, IRC - if there are any impressionable youngsters reading this post: MUSIC IS FREE! Why pay when the corporations get all the money anyway? The music-maker hardly gets ANYTHING! Why slave away at Cinna-buns for three hours to pay for a half-ounce piece of plastic when that money is just going to pay for another cigar for the totally rich and greedy music company executives anyway? And so many people are doing it (especially the *cool kids*) that you'll NEVER get arrested! The days of paying fifteen bucks for a CD are as dead as the stove-pipe hat, monocle and vest-pocket watch! Everything is free, Free, FREE! Act now before they encrypt music, then you'll NEVER be able to get free music again! So hurry up and stock up NOW NOW NOW!

Re:No...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, he's probably referring to the three living dwarves. Only Grumpy, Bashful and Doc are still alive.

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.

Re:More themes

[redcup]

That still doesn't beat sexual positions.

"Hey, would you try DoggyStyle? I can't get in.

Re:And after seven...

[MrPoopyPants]

What about Gimli?

Stop modding the parent up!

[John Harrison]

Please? I am wrong. Remainder works for both subtraction and division. Not matter how much I think this in a bad thing, it is still fact.

I have already paid for my sin, don't make it worse by modding my up.

Smurfs

[oo7tushar]

Smurfs are good to use as there's so many. Of course that only gets you a couple 1000. You could put them into Quadrants, talk about them as if they were in gangs...the Reds, Blues and so on. Then the head node of each grouping could be papa smurf. That kinda thing.

Otaku.

[digitalsushi]

as a fanboy otaku i can tell you its best to name all your machines after cutesey Japanese girl's names. ALL OF THEM. cause when they ping back, that means they really do love you, and no one can EVER take that away from you. ever. *snicker*

Re:Check the RFC

[nelsonal]

Great, I'm color blind. Try explaining to your boss why you just formatted the brown sever when you were supposed to do the green one.

Re:Countries

[grammar fascist]

I use capital cities.

Like NEWYORK, SALTLAKECITY, and SPRINGVILLE?

Re:And after seven...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember working at a company where the workstations were named after the 7 dwarves and the NFS file server was named snow white. So of course the seven dwarves had to mount snow white at the same time.

Re:alphanumeric dotted quad

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as long as you name the 5th element "Lilu" :-)

Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n

[Man of E]

Who the hell wants to be Boron

Moron is a good element too.

Re:Naming Conventions.

[JabberWokky]

Shafey and Twan sounded like extremely steriotypical flaming gay names. It works better if you are sitting in an IT room, and can refer to them with a sudden lisp. Or if you've wrestled with them for several years and their "sudden death" problems, and are desperate to find *something* funny in the situation. (FWIW, it was due to the fact that the network was split both ArcNet and Ethernet, and the Digiboards plus two interface cards caused apparantly irreconcilable catastrophic conflicts).

--
Evan "Lovely network - WP 5.1 on a bunch of 8086s and 80286s for the real important types"

Re:Naming Conventions.

[Vanbo]

Ever had one of the staff leave or worse die? We had the founder of the company pass away which led to our mail server sending messages with his name in bounced messages. This led to people thinking that messages were coming from a dead guy (I am not joking) which led to a massive renaming of all servers.

We now use elements (hydrogen, lithium, etc) for our servers. If you have thousands of servers then you will need to use longer hostnames with groups as in hydrogen.www.domain.com vs hydrogen.mail.domain.com. Another good choice is colors, red, blue, green, etc...

vanbo

Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n

[DA_MAN_DA_MYTH]

Thank you, I just hit an all time low when I just looked down at my dev machine I am at right now, realizing my machine's name. The label I happen to see upon the face...

BORON

Re:Instead of Sci-Fi

[more fool you]

and do you call the win2k box uranus?

Re:Instead of Sci-Fi

[Pig Hogger]

and do you call the win2k box uranus?

Don't you know? The International Astronomical Union [iau.org] just renamed Uranus, because it was tired of the enless jokes about that.

It is now named Urectum.

What? You mean...?

[Rui del-Negro]

You mean you don't have to pick the names for your servers from the Lord of the Rings...??

RMN
~~~

Re:Sci-Fi

[Anonymous DWord]

Sounds cool. The Win2K servers could be JDean, BHolly, Pre, AEarhart...

Re:Just to annoy the RIAA

[Anonymous DWord]

"Ohmigod! Britney's ports are all open! She's getting rooted like crazy!"

Re:people names?

[PopStar]

At a company I did some contract work at, they used first names ... it was the worst thing ever.

Imagine yelling any of the following in to a cell phone while in public ...

"Brenda went down? When? How long?"

"Hey, I just checked the logs, and someone has been fingering Mike!"

"Well, mount Jennifer and see what happens."

"Probe Mark and make sure there are no leaks."

"Yeah, Martha is one of the SCSI ones"

etc, etc, etc.

Re:Mary, call them all Mary

[TheCrunch]

Hmmm. I dunno... there's something about Mary...

(sorry, couldn't resist)

Re:Naming Conventions.

[pmc]

Another good choice is colors, red, blue, green, etc...

One place where I worked had (city code)(location code)(machine designation)(colour) - lots of offices in the same city.

Anyway, a typical server name would be NYCVENSGREEN. The key was that they all had an S before the colour, which lead to such names as

STEAK
SLIME
STEAL

Ah - the hours we spent trying to think these up.

Boot Up!

[epsalon]

A:Boot up?
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!

...

Drug Names

[The Variable Man]

In a previous job we had machines named after drugs. Developer conversations could be amusing. "NFS isn't working" "Which environment?" "I'm on heroin but I guess I could switch to methadone" ...

Location based naming (was: Re:be sensible

[billtom]

Well if physically finding the machines is important, why not use machine names of:

Longitude+Latitude+Altitude

With enough precision the names are guarenteed to be unique (to one universe). You could even install GPS and altimeter cards and have the machines name themselves automatically.

Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n

[Derek]

"One lab I was in that had a lot of computers used deities..."

That's funny, in our lab the administrators named themselves after deity! (Which was fine, except for all the bowing and blood offerings.)

-Derek

Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n

[bjq]

The preexisiting name/number combination is a good idea (i assume you meant the integer atomic number, not weight, as the other poster pointed out).

Personally, I name my machines after girls I've slept with (and use the sequence number in the IP).

It doesn't scale well, but it does make scaling much more fun; running out of names for machines is a definite reminder that I really need to get out more.