

Choosing a name for your computer - ScotterC
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178

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elasticdog
What do you do when you have 200+ machines of a handful of different types
(database, mail, web, etc.) that you want to have named? Having some sort of
organized categorization would be beneficial, but it seems like naming them
after 200+ different colors doesn't make life any easier.

Naming after the purpose of the box also gets messy if you're not strict about
renaming when the machine is repurposed. And if you group by "theme groups" as
the RFC suggests, you're still stuck renaming a machine if it's no longer one
of your 7 dwarfs (database servers, or whatever). Should the name convey
meaning at all, or just be a random label?

A developer I know doesn't see the problem with just having the full location
(state, data center, rack, rack location), which I'm against, but we haven't
been able to agree on a good middle ground approach that scales. Is location
data in a name universally bad?

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nmcfarl
The paper mentions that a numeric suffix scheme works fine if "you have a lot
of machines and there are no reasons for any human to distinguish between
them". I’d say modern production setup with a ton of configuration managed
machines that no one logs into should be named this way.

This is more advice for "snowflake servers" and workstations.

As for geographic location I had (viewed) a bad experience college when a
server in the main server room started DOSing another box in the same room.
The culprit was ruled out for a very long while 'cause it’s name claimed that
it was all the way across campus - so it couldn’t be the problem. Because of
this I’m with the paper on the no geography in names point. Geography in names
causes thinking errors in people.

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davvid
The epilogue mentioned that the original paper included a Gary Larson cartoon.
That got me curious so I hunted down the original paper. It was worth it ;-)

<http://www.mel.nist.gov/msidlibrary/doc/libes89.pdf>

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nmcfarl
For something published in 1990 it holds up remarkably well. It is however
almost entirely conventional wisdom at this point. Which does raise the
question of weather the points made became conventional wisdom because of this
papers publication.

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ultimoo
Wonderful essay, thanks for posting it.

For servers, I have seen numbered-names work quite well in most of the
projects that I've worked on -- www01, www02, app01, app02, db01, mq01, mq02,
so on and so forth.

Workstations my university were named by location -- swlab01 or even by the
hall numbers, 496-01, 496-02.

Unfortunately, I've never come across more creative themes of hostnames like
colors, or planets in Star Wars or football players etc. But I will definitely
re-read this RFC next time I get to setup a lab or a series of servers from
scratch.

~~~
fernly
> Workstations my university were named by location -- swlab01 or even by the
> hall numbers, 496-01, 496-02

They were never moved? Or did they have to be renamed then?

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r00fus
Fauna/Flora will give you a large set of names to use e.g: reptiles yields 9k
species alone [1]. A theme is best if it is a large enough superset to be
inexhaustible for your naming needs (ie, 9 planets = bad choice if you expect
more than say, 3 or 4 machines). Good examples: mythical pantheons, sports
lingo, mixed drink names, etc.

[1] <http://www.reptile-database.org/db-info/SpeciesStat.html>

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fernly
You can make subtle political comments. Long ago I was very comfortable with
my assigned workstation, so I named it "bag-end".

Then owing to a stupid management decision all in my group were required to
move to machines of an unfamiliar and inferior sort. I named this one
"crickhollow".

I don't think anyone in management got the reference but I felt better.

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sbennettmcleish
I've long been a fan of collective nouns, you could almost never run out even
if you choose only birds .. Murder anyone?

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ScotterC
There's a great cluster at CMU that had all Phish songs as names

