Server Names For a New Generation 429
itwbennett writes "Server naming is well-trod ground on Slashdot. But as new generations enter the workforce, they're relearning the fundamentals of what makes a good scheme. Can servers named after characters from The Simpsons or The Howard Stern show stand the test of time? If you name your servers after the Seven Dwarfs, can you have any doubt that Grumpy will cause you trouble? Striking a balance between fun and functional is harder than it seems."
If I name my server "Coca~Cola" ... (Score:4, Funny)
... can I get sued for copyright infringement ?
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Copyright, no. Trademark infringement, yes.
But I didn't paint my server red and white ! (Score:3)
And my server ain't shaped like a coke bottle either
Can they still sue me?
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Our IT network uses this convention, annoys the hell out of the network engineers as we now have servers like cerise, cerulean etc...black and white was fine ;)
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Just hire more women as network engineers.
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Especially if you are color blind!
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I call mine Skywalker, Vader and Yoda.
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Most of my minmatar servers are made from leftover Dell, HP and IBM parts held together with duct tape for good measure.
Re:If I name my server "Coca~Cola" ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If I name my server "Coca~Cola" ... (Score:4, Informative)
Trademarks do not necessarily have to be registered; and can be lost by not using them even though they're registered; and may be lost by not defending it (i.e. letting infringement to go on for long time, without taking any action). It's far from black and white.
Actually in this coca-cola example: just naming your server like that should be fine, assuming he's not running a shop selling coca-cola branded servers.
However coca-cola being such a well-known brand may have a case against you selling computers under the coca-cola brand. Especially if you were to paint them red, with a white wave in the middle, because in that case you obviously try to pretend to belong to the soft drink company instead of being a computer seller, and cause market confusion. Or if you would paint them in that red/white colour scheme, but calling your company the coca computer company or so.
Trademarks are indeed generally industry-specific indeed, think Apple Computer vs Apple Music as well-known example.
Re:If I name my server "Coca~Cola" ... (Score:4, Funny)
Server Names: The Next Generation (Score:5, Funny)
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Fun names worked great, for a while. (Score:5, Insightful)
At my startup company, we named servers after notable videogame characters. It was quite nifty when we had three servers; it stayed fun for years. But when we reached 30 servers, gradually problems crept in. One machine needed to be rebuilt and the name kept getting reassigned. Similar names were confusing.
Server naming schemes are cute until you outgrow them. Hint: Determine for yourself when you outgrow them. We now name servers by their function and their sequence number.
Re:Fun names worked great, for a while. (Score:4, Informative)
Hint: Use CNAME and you can keep the fun server name, too!
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Hint: Use CNAME and you can keep the fun server name, too!
...not if they are Windows servers with file shares (SMB). As of Win2k3, CNAMEs don't work for that. Ironically, exposing Samba file shares on Linux works just fine with CNAMEs.
Haven't tried again with the latest Windows server software, so YMMV.
Re:Fun names worked great, for a while. (Score:5, Informative)
I actually just dealt with this recently. Vista and 7 have no problem connecting to servers using CNAMES, but XP does. The solution is a single registry change on the server side. It's a very easy fix. Google DisableStrictNameChecking.
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Hint: Use CNAME and you can keep the fun server name, too!
CNAME's are great for client machines but when it comes to servers, the people managing them are professionals who should understand the naming convention. If any sysadmin cant understand the naming convention in 15 seconds, it's a bad convention. Users who have remote access to their machines have a functional name and an easy to remember CNAME.
Users should not need to connect to servers that aren't defined by Group Policy or login script, even beyond this it's easy to tell them LON dash EXC dash ZERO O
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If any sysadmin cant understand the naming convention in 15 seconds, it's a bad convention.
So true... my last gig was at a place where the naming convention was a mix of football players names, cricket players names and character's from the Matrix movies. Made zero sense - yet they didn't want to make changes that would've meant it was logical. Oh yeah, zero documentation too! Very glad to have moved to a new company, where I've been able to implement a naming scheme for servers which makes logical sense - function/number-location.domainname.
Re:Fun names worked great, for a while. (Score:4, Funny)
Bottom line - if you can't say your server name 3 times fast, then you are hindering the humans that have to talk about that server on a daily basis.
So I guess "Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tubeman" is out?
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I agree. Strict functional naming conventions come with their own problems. For example, I just had to re-read for the umptyumpth time, the multiple re-sent emails, wiki pages, and web pages containing the corporate warnings about making sure you're logged into the correct server before executing changes. It seems that
Logical name and friendly name (Score:5, Informative)
At the company I work for (large international corp) we have a logical name and a friendly name. The logical name helps identify where the machine is geographically (country, data center, unit) and the friendly name which is given out to everyone, which can be whatever name was requested, as long as it is suitable. This way you keep both the network team happy (you can tell from the name where to find it) and everyone else too (they have a name that is easy to remember).
In the case of virtual machines and blades there is another logical naming scheme, adapted to the context.
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Dual naming (Score:5, Insightful)
I joined a company with over 500 servers and a really incoherent naming scheme - or lack of. I could talk for hours on how you built a name out of a class hiearachy which also matched its class in puppet, but the dual naming them was a win. Basically it works like this:
When servers are racked up, they're just numbered, with a TLA for the location they're in based on nearest airport code.
lax-001
lax-002
lax-003
That name is PERMANENT unless it gets shipped to a new location. It also gets assigned an IP right away. But so far a bit meaningless. then it gets assigned a function
foo-web-01 CNAME lax-002
mail-02 CNAME lax-003
bar-db-06 CNAME lax-004
This has a couple of huge advantages, namely:
1. When a guy in the datacentre asks you for label names to rack them up, you just say "just number them 45-67", and they get on with it before you've even assigned them.
2. No re-labelling
3. You can look up the "meaningless" name just using DNS
4. You have a numbered inventory
5. With a bit of work, you can pre-assign IP addresses to servers before they've even turned up and get the network guys to tag them straight in to the switch on arrival
Re:Dual naming (Score:5, Funny)
lax-001
lax-002
lax-003
That name is PERMANENT unless it gets shipped to a new location
I take it then you prepend "ex-" to the name indicating they used to be lax...
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I'm currently volunteering as the head of the computing dept. of a student radio station, and this year we've gone completely the opposite way.
Why? Because when I arrived, we had a server called "*name of station*fs1" (File Server 1) which wasn't a file server, a server simply named "*name of station*" (makes for fun times when it goes down...!) which wasn't the main, all-powerful server, "jukebox" (which did run the station jukebox... and more) and some other systematic, role-based names such as *name*sw0
Functional (Score:2, Insightful)
I realise that the new generation may not be bothered with such mundane details in their pursuit of eternal hipsterness, but server names need to be functional. Whenever possible, IT should be able to identify server's location, platform and purpose by glancing at the name... "TEAMEDWARD1" just doesn't cut it, unless the server is located in some depressingly remote location nobody knew about, until the server was placed there.
Re:Functional (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. After years of enduring networks with servers with tree names or GI Joe character names, when it came for me to come up with names for my servers and other network devices, I came up with functional names that describe physical locations, departments, functions, and so forth. That way I have a descriptive network rather than trying to remember which one of the Power Rangers the last IT guy liked the best.
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BORING.
Server names should be members of an (interesting) class.
Agate, garnet....
Socrates, Hypocrates...
(all Berkeley.edu)
blood...
(bbn.com... I'll let you guess some of the others in the series :)
Re:Functional (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. After years of enduring networks with servers with tree names or GI Joe character names, when it came for me to come up with names for my servers and other network devices, I came up with functional names that describe physical locations, departments, functions, and so forth. That way I have a descriptive network rather than trying to remember which one of the Power Rangers the last IT guy liked the best.
They can be functional by metaphor. Lake names can be used for storage. Star or planet names or river names for mailservers, etc. OK, given the server name Mercurius, people won't instantly know that it's a mailserver, but once the system is clear, it's quite simple. And occasionally you come across a name that you don't know, which can be educational as well for those interested.
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Is that Mercurius or Murkurius? Now, repeat that over the phone to one of your underlings or bosses when you're in a location with spotty cell reception and there's an outage.
This makes more work. "What did that thing do again?" Pitty on the poor fool who comes next.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurius
The term is not clear, at all. Now, what happens when someone (say, you) decides the scheme doesn't quite work for a given system, etc. and you need to redo/add to the convention? I've run into this. I've go
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Re:Functional (Score:4, Insightful)
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You should put a sticker on the rack too. :) It'll help new sysadmins. Third rack from the left? Is that when facing the front or back? I guess it'd work for the 3rd rack, if you only had 5 racks in there.
Re:Functional (Score:4, Insightful)
Except when any of the server's location, platform or purpose changes, you'll have to change its name.
Right!
Is this a bad thing? Is it better to name the server SnowWhite and then having to remember whether SnowWhite is a DNS server or a Web server this week? Better to rename it (even better to reimage it) from prod-dns1 to dev-web1. I ship servers between datacenters so infrequently that renaming the server when it moves is not a problem.
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So how do you deal with servers that have more than one purpose?
If you've got too many purposes on a single machine, that's an indication of potential problems anyway. Split up into separate VMs (with their own names) and the physical machine then has a clear purpose: hosting VMs.
It hasn't changed much, except for VMs (Score:3)
I've used various naming schemes for systems I've setup (normally based on whatever video game I'm playing at the time). But the biggest change I've done is naming of virtual machines when I was administrating multiple servers, each running multiple VMs.
As I can have a lot of VMs on a single server, remembering what VM maps to what server can be a pain. I normally just do something simple like having the base server called "blue", then the VMs will be called "blue-1", "blue-2", etc. This helped me track down the host server quickly when I needed to fix something.
Re:It hasn't changed much, except for VMs (Score:5, Insightful)
You're in deep trouble when you build an ESX cluster. Then you'll have blue-1 running on the ESX server red and blue-2 running on orange.
You'll strain something (Score:4, Funny)
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As far as server names I'm still using [sitecode][application][function][d|t|p|dr][instance #] where application is the LOB app name, function is something like app, db, web, etc and d|t|p|dr are which environment (dev, test, prod,
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There are lots of admins running the free ESXi due to budgets since it lets them have more servers per box. (free version usually don't support hot-moves)
I run all my ADS/DNS/DHCP servers on three of them (not all on the same box though)
I'll be upgrading to the licensed versions in the next year.
Re:It hasn't changed much, except for VMs (Score:4, Informative)
VirtualBox does now support live migration as of version 3.1 via it's "Teleporting [virtualbox.org]" feature.
Now that I'm mid 30's I realize I'm not young. (Score:5, Funny)
I know the Pokémon names are going to get old fast.
Star Wars, Star Trek, even Battlestar Galactica are great sources for names. JigglyPuff is NOT a server name!
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That's why, when I was in college, they used Pokemon names for DNS resolution of IPs given out via DHCP to laptops roaming campus :-)
Re:Now that I'm mid 30's I realize I'm not young. (Score:5, Funny)
Jigglypuff is that Prescott-based box with the stack of Maxtor drives in it... it vibrates, then explodes.
I name them after girls (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I name them after girls (Score:5, Funny)
It originated from a long forgotten time when I can't get laid.
Too bad your freudian slip of mixing past and present tense gave you away.
Re:I name them after girls (Score:5, Funny)
I name mine after girls that I actually laid. And I'm running a data center for Google.
Ba-dum-bum. [instantrimshot.com]
Re:I name them after girls (Score:5, Funny)
I name mine after girls that I actually laid. And I'm running a data center for Google.
So....
Christy_from_Canada_1, Christy_from_Canada_2, Christy_from_Canada_3, ...Christy_from_Canada_99999
Re:I name them after girls (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that's actually a bit of a problem. Canadians really need to get a little more creative in naming their daughters.
Re:I name them after girls (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that's actually a bit of a problem. Canadians really need to get a little more creative in naming their daughters.
How about their racks? ChristyAA, ChristyC, ChristyDD...
Re:I name them after girls (Score:5, Funny)
He's got 99999 problems but a server name ain't one.
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I always thought you should name servers after former employees. As an added bonus, if you're working a startup and you run out of names, that's a good indication that layoffs are coming, and you should start printing your résumé.
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So...
NULL.google.com :P
???
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Simple... (Score:4, Funny)
I also named my dog "Stay". Sure he gets a little confused sometimes -- "Come here, Stay" -- but like the server names, it keeps things interesting.
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So you're running Linux on Bob [wikipedia.org]?
That's quite confusing indeed...
How it really gets done. (Score:2)
[2 char OS Type] + [4 char location] + [2 char Hardware Type] + [2 char server role] + [4 digit Number]
WNNYNYVMPD0001
Windows server in New York Data Center running as a Virtual Machine in the Production environment first server.
RHLACAAMTS0200
Red had Server in Los Angeles Data Center on a AMD platform Test Environment 200th server.
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Done by the inexperienced perhaps. Location, sure. A number, sure. But type and purpose and OS? No thanks. DNS is not a configuration management tool.
Assign your servers names and addresses for purposes of managing the servers. Assign your applications their own names, and (potentially) addresses.
Doctor Who (Score:3, Funny)
My main server is called TARDIS, because it's bigger on the inside...
Be creative but have rules (Score:3, Interesting)
Eventually you may outgrow any naming convention but by then you hope to be on an island sipping margaritas while someone else worries about these things.
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Big companies might be able to afford a seperate server (Or more sensibly, virtual host) for every service, but in the smaller ones it's common for servers to do many, many tasks.
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You just gave away your inexperience there.
You really want to touch configuration files on hundreds/thousands of machines just because a server IP has changed? How do you migrate a server to new hardware without downtime?
There's this thing called a "DNS Resolver Cache", in every OS. And another thing called a "TTL" on a DNS record. They'll save you hours of scripting work the next time you need to do a service migration.
Cross functional standard that is driven by mgmt (Score:3)
ie, SJN1FIDBSW0001 The goal would be to have each device identified by a location (SJN), location code (1), businessorg (FI), zone (DB) device type (SW),
How about a web server in NYC datacenter 4 behind a load balancer, but in the DMZ, for the finance organization. The logical "placement" identifier really comes in handy to quickly tell where the hell something is located, inside outside, behind lb, not behind lb, in dmz, extranet bullshit, etc.
NYC4FIWEBSRV1001
Re:Cross functional standard that is driven by mgm (Score:5, Insightful)
There can be a naming standard that is applied to all devices, network, servers, storage, so on, that help simplify how an IT organization works. This has to be driven by management.
Naming things by some arbitrary set of characters from your favorite story does not scale well, to say the least.
Lets create a standard that scales like a mofo:
ie, SJN1FIDBSW0001 ,logical identifer (0), physical device # (001)
The goal would be to have each device identified by a location (SJN), location code (1), businessorg (FI), zone (DB) device type (SW),
The problem with that naming convention is you get very similar named servers, which might only differ by a single character in the middle of a hard-to-scan blob of text.
On colleague of mine has managed to flatten a production oracle server because he connected to the Manchester one, not the Washington one. The difference was embedded in the middle of the all-caps dns. Several people have restarted services on the wrong server too, again a single character difference in 15.
Since then I've instituted a policy of changing PS1 to prepend the hostname with the location in plain text.
When it comes to outside addressing, heigherarchial dns and cnames allow easy addressing. oracle1.washington.mycorp.com, web1.gaza.mycorp.com is fairly clear where the box is and what the function is, and when it comes time to reassign functions, you just update the cname.
Re:Cross functional standard that is driven by mgm (Score:4, Insightful)
Moderate parent up please!
Full, descriptive names are the only sane way to name servers.
Alphanumerical gibberish is a system promoted by suit wearing idiots who's job it is to track corporate assets, not the people who's job it is to press the "OK" button on the "Are you sure you want to destroy this 5 TB volume?" dialog box.
No, you don't need the operating system platform in the server name, or the room code, rack number, owner, or anything else. Learn to use spreadsheets, asset tags, and description fields like a normal person. Name servers something clear and simple, like "ProdFile1" or "DmzDns2", and put the unrelated meta data where it belongs: elsewhere. Don't be afraid of CamelCasing either, just because server names are case insensitive doesn't mean they are not case preserving.
I've been at a site recently where there were wildly unrelated servers distinguished only by a single character, using both the numeral '1' and the letter 'I' in the same position. I saw, with my own two eyes, one of their senior admins moving the mouse cursor towards the "OK" on the "Are you sure you want to permanently delete this VM" prompt, and they had the wrong server! I corrected the guy before it was too late, so he then promptly found a second, also incorrect, server to delete.
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Or you could do something "new and radical" and use SNMP objects with all that information, and just name the server whatever you want.
On any network big enough to need those controls you are speaking of, you will have some kind of management platform.
On my home network (Score:2)
I only have one server, so I call it Mother.
The laptop is Ripley.
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Is this built up from the years of pent-up frustration developed by not having Sigourney Weaver in your lap?
My favorite server names (Score:3)
The seven deadly sins...
Nothing beats giving the sales guy a computer named "greed"
-J
I used contageous diseases (Score:2)
Thanks, XKCD (Score:2, Funny)
I named my server Robert'); DROP Table students;--
Traditionalist names... (Score:2)
Maxwell, Tesla, Watt, etc.
What's wrong with functional names? (Score:3)
Cute names are so old and busted. "Okay, Kenny is the one with the accounting software that crashes constantly. Cartman is the old file server, because it's huge. Kyle is for the legal department."
Name your shit for what it does and, if you have multiple data centers, where it's located.
Re:What's wrong with functional names? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nailed it.
With servers being generally virtual these days, and the underlying physical hardware a highly replaceable substrate, there's no reason for an enterprise to have serves which do more than one thing. If a server does only one thing, it ought to be named for that one thing.
mailserver-eastcoast.example.com
Where is that machine? Somewhere in the blade cage. If I yank the blade, it'll appear in a few seconds on another blade. Where is the data? On the giant fiber RAID, which is replicated in the west coast office, and two secret locations.
Compute is a cloud, storage is a cloud, services come from that cloud, the clouds made of physical devices in as many locations as make sense.
The old physical network topology is finally just the nerves and pumps, and no longer the focus.
The focus is the data. The data is what we produce to make value, to drive the business process. Servers aren't special anymore, they're like hammers. You don't name hammers, typically. But you might have more than w=one, and you definitely want to know two things: where is it, and what is it for.
location in name is wrong (Score:2)
With apologies to T.S. Eliot (Score:5, Funny)
It isn't just one of your holiday games.
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you a server has three different names..."
Re:With apologies to T.S. Eliot (Score:5, Funny)
Take me to the server, Papa's got a new ... (Score:2)
HHGTG (Score:5, Funny)
Some names will stand the test of time. A box with two monitors should of course be named Zaphod.
We didn't, but I wanted to... (Score:2)
Because of the risk of outgrowing a naming scheme, because you run out of names, or because too many names become a chore to keep track of, I once wanted to do a hybrid approach, but instead went with the _ approach in the end.
The initial idea were to use only a few names, for functions, ie. Frodo for File server, Gandalf for the Gateway, etc. But once you start doing that, you might as well just just Fileserver, or Gateway instead...
I'd say that in larger installations, "cute" server names are a thing of t
the _ scheme? (Score:2)
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We didn't, it was an example. :P
Keep it simple (Score:2)
Names for servers (Score:2)
Several years ago I was working at a network equipment manufacturer in Sunnyvale, Ca. We had 2 monster Spectra Logic tape silos. One worked petty well the other not so much. One was name "Gir" and the other was named "Dib" Gir used to do random things for no apparent reason like wake up, pick a tape and eject it. We would walk into the data center to find a pile of tapes on the floor. Nothing in the logs, no backups running, it just decided it was time to eject a tape. WTF! We had a name plate attached that
Mythological figures (Score:2)
I use antique names transliterated to English - eg. enki, metis, dagon, tiamat, pallas, etc. They're mostly short, easy to spell, pronounce and remember, and there's an almost endless pool to draw from.
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Onomatopoeia (Score:3)
I've been on the Internet a long time and, when I named my first Internet-connected computers, I thought it would be cool to name them after Star Trek characters. (The guys a floor up from me decided to name their after planets.) It wasn't long before I discovered that, at that time, half the machines on the Internet were named after Star Trek characters, and the other half were named after planets. I decided that, in the future, I would choose the most original naming scheme I could think of. I've been naming my computers after onomatopoeic words for years - screech, kablamm, whirr, etc. There are plenty of words, so the chances of running out are small.
The only time I got into trouble is when I was putting together a server for a customer, and I called it "crash".
"For a new generation"? (Score:2)
Asset labels (Score:2)
All machines should have two (or more) names. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with naming servers after their functions is that in most shops, a server does more than one thing. And they often get moved / repurposed / whatever.
So that machine that's now ldap-ny-02? Well, last week it was web-ny-05. A couple months from now, are you going to remember that name change, and that web-ny-05 had that flaky power supply / fibre card / etc?
Oh, that service that had been running on lasco05? We moved that to the 'new' lasco03. (and there have been how many machines named lasco03?)
I've worked in a lot of places, and these days with clusters, virtual hosts, etc, you often have a different public-facing name (which will get used when people call in a problem ... how are they to know that some service is 5+ machines behind a load balancer? Or that all of the web sub-domains are really on the same server? Even if you don't plan for the abstraction, it already exists due to these different aggregations.
If you give the hardware one name when it comes in, and only use aliases for each of the public services, you don't have to worry about recycling names just so there's no service interuptions. ... and, true story, I've even worked in place with a machine named 'teller' after Edward Teller (the last article), as all of our mail servers were named after scientists ... but when I moved it for testing, I renamed the pair for that cluster to 'penn', and we later added a 'copperfield' and 'houdini' ... but we had to scrap the physicist names when our director didn't believe us that the spam filters weren't rejecting his e-mail because it was going through a machine named 'lovelace', and it was named after Ada Lovelace, not Linda Lovelace.)
I've worked with machines named after cheeses, spices, cartoon characters, music albums, movies, adverbs, muppets, states, rivers, tv-characters, the boss's family, periodic table, hashes of the service/location/os, astronomical phenomena,
Be wary, you might be suspicious for your names (Score:4, Insightful)
A current case [futurezone.at] (page in German) of an Austrian person who got their door kicked down for naming his servers after ancient Germanic gods (which was good enough as an excuse to label him Nazi which is against the Austrian criminal code).
More likely, though, they didn't like his rather critical attitude towards the Austrian government and its position towards surveillance, and they needed some kind of excuse to fill his room with a swat team.
So be wary if you dare to voice your dissent, don't name your servers after, say, some Muslim prophets.
Re:Bugs? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bugs? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bugs? (Score:4, Funny)
At last count there are over 640K bugs! That ought to be enough for any organisation.
Re:Bugs? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd rather take this a step further and name them after viruses.
Smallpox.
HIV.
Ebola.
Polio.
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The full naming scheme is [media type][number], so hard drive number sixteen is HDRV10.