10 ms·

Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained. Your own personal lap

Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained. Your own personal laptop is a different matter. Moreover, if you want personality, just set up your ~/.ssh/config to retain the legacy name for yourself, e.g. "ssh middleearthname" to connect to server001.foo.com

dagw 17y ago
The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random. There is often structure and information embedded in the naming scheme, even when it might not be obvious to an outsider. Having someone come in and replace all of that with server001-server999 will often remove information.
- blhack 17y ago
  The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random. Exactly. For instance, my firewall is called "charon". Personification is a good thing and should be encouraged. It's easier to visualize things that way. From an inside-out perspective (people such as accountants who see everything but, for the most part, do not understand it), naming servers like $function_$row_$rack_$slot or whatever else makes sense...it will simplify things. The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective. Think about it like this: you have things in your kitchen, right? Say you have a toaster, a refrigerator, a mixer, and a microwave. You would NEVER call them things like "appliance_counter1_left", "appliance_floor_right" etc. This would be confusing. It is for this reason that humans give things names; toaster, refrigerator, and mixer are all names, they're just very common ones.
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    If you worked managing a supermarket you would call them City17_shop5_aisle4_refridgerator2. > The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective. That depends - I'd much rather a firewall rule that told me that Glasgow Database Server 2 can talk to London Mail Server 3 for SMTP traffic than one that told me MissPiggy can talk to Kermit for χάρτης traffic. Especially when it's not a system I deal with every day and I haven't cached the name/function mappings in my head. On the other hand, the UK postal system works well with a mixture of numeric sequences (house and flat numbers), cutesy names (road names, city names) and arbitrary government assigned gibberish (Post Codes).
gaius 17y ago
The names aren't random, tho'. The people using the machines every day know that (for example) all the database servers are named after planets, all the web servers are elements of the periodic table, all the development boxes are Muppets characters, etc. It costs nothing and makes your engineers happy. Plus it is intuitive, mistakes of the kind of being logged into the wrong box never happen. I personally have very nearly experienced a disaster because the official naming convention had only one character difference between production and UAT... Anyway, you've missed my point a bit. It doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things what the boxes are called. It DOES matter than your company is employing people to impose pointless, trivial changes and policies on people with real work to do.
- Poiesis 17y ago
  I much rather prefer managing names rather than codes/numbers. One major reason is that often in a standardized system, the least significant bits are on the right, and at least in Windows often a longer name will be truncated in a display. I don't need many characters to tell one dwarf from another, but to tell names of the type XXYYYNNNNN0-12 from XXYYYNNNNN0-13 is a huge pain sometimes. The big win, though, for a more clinical naming is that shared context/training can be easier, and in a larger org the standardization of course makes things a lot easier to deal with. But of course, standardization can be done with the more whimsical names. And a lot of the time the naming scheme that is drawn up by committee takes just as long to learn as the more fun ones (mostly because they need to be abbreviated a bunch). I suppose the one thing you can say for formal naming systems that is fairly inarguable is that once you understand the rules, you can look at an unfamiliar machine name and know instantly what it does. For machines named after fictional characters that's only true if you read/watch the same books/shows as the people doing the naming.
- misterbwong 17y ago
  Honestly, the muppets/elements/planets works really well...until there's some turnover. Then the new sysadmin thinks the three stooges should be the db servers and capital cities should be the web servers. Then you end up having conversations like: "Hey, can you move some data up to larry, moe, and saturn? We're building on hydrogen, oxygen, and sacramento." The confusion this causes for new hires and non-natives is real, albeit somewhat comical. edit: ServerXX is no better-the names should give a clue to what function they perform (i.e. IRV-FNP01 = located in irvine, file and print server, 01 [oldest server])
bcl 17y ago
It depends on the number of machines. When I have 3 or 4 they get names (currently using Firefly characters), but when I have say 20 or more they get numbers. Or they get both so that my scripts are easier to write. For me it also depends on function. If its just another app server cloned from the master, it gets a number -- it has no personality. But if it is a backup server, mail server, dev or test system it gets a name.
xiaoma 17y ago
"Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained." That's true. However, humans do better with names than numbers. Otherwise, DNS wouldn't exist. The real question is who do you want to optimize for?
- msluyter 17y ago
  I think it's dependent on the situation. I enjoy the charm of machines named "frodo" and whatnot, but when I first arrived at my current company, the totally arbitrary naming conventions was highly confusing because we had three environments (dev/stage/prod) and several databases and other classes of server per environment. Now we have a standardized naming convention with names like "dev-foo01", "stage-bar02", "prod-baz01" etc.. (were foo/bar/baz denote the purpose of the machine) and it's much easier to deal with.
  - garnet7 17y ago
    dev servers: gnomes staging: dwarves prod: elves
    - whatusername 17y ago
      Sure. But with a DEV_SYD_DB03, UAT_MEL_APP07, PROD_BNE_DB01 kind of scheme, I've got much more information at a glance than you do.
  - BerislavLopac 17y ago
    @garnet7, there are no gnomes in LoTR. ;) Or, actually, there are, but they are actually Elves...
    - garnet7 17y ago
      Aw, son of a ... And I can't go back and fix it either! s/gnomes/hobbits/ Well, let's hope no hobbits read this website.
raganwald 17y ago
Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained. I bet you could save $10,000 a year by eliminating the arbitrary names and calling them ServerXXX. Sorry for the attempt at a witty reply. Let's start again. Agreed, there are efficiencies. The point of the article is that when you institute changes like this, you may create unintended consequences like a mass exodus of people who liked working for a company where the servers were named after Muppet characters and associate "Server042" with a company where professional managers demand cover sheets for their TPS reports. Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company?
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  > Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company? If you knew what the consequences were going to be then they wouldn't be unanticipated, but if you didn't know then you couldn't accurately answer the question. Aren't you just asking people to 'know the unknown unknowns' and never make poor decisions? Wouldn't it be a more realistic suggestion to ask them to ask "Was this good for the company and if not, should we revert to how it was before?"
  - gridspy 17y ago
    It is very rare for any individual to completely reverse their previous decision, especially when the results of that decision are subjective, delayed and hard to measure. By the time management realises that soda should have been free, the opinions of the top engineers have irreversibly changed.
  - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
    It's an Office Space reference. In the movie, the PHBs hold a meeting in which they solemnly instruct all their employees to ask "Is what I'm doing good for the company?" before they do anything. The audience rolls its eyes in sympathy, for the reasons you've pointed out here.
    - 17y ago
jimbokun 17y ago
How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "server001" vs. "server002" or "server003", etc.? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that?
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "Feynman" vs. "Fermi" or "Farnsworth"? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that? And what do you call the next server? By contrast, "hq-web-001" is an early webserver at head quarters, while "br1-sql-020" is a later database server at branch office 1, and the next server name is the next in the appropriate sequence.
  - aplusbi 17y ago
    "Feynmann", "Fermi" and "Farnsworth" are much better than "server001", "server002" and "server003" but are arguably a step behind "hq-web-001" and "br1-sql-020". I work for a company where most of the servers are just numbered and it's can be rather confusing.
billybob 17y ago
"It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained." I'm not a systems admin, but I presume this is because you can write a for loop that counts through your machines and does something to each, right? In that case, couldn't you just have nested arrays? machines = ['mailservers'=>['Earth'=>'some IP', 'Mars'=>'some IP'],'devservers'=>['Dopey'=>'some IP', 'Sneezy'=>'some IP']] ...etc. Now everyone can connect to a machine with a memorable name, AND you can loop through all the dbservers if you need to, AND anyone who doesn't understand the system can look in one place to grok it. What's the problem?
- blueben 17y ago
  The problem is that you're not a sysadmin. I'm going to assume that you are a programmer since you are assuming this is simply a programming problem. I am a sysadmin, and I can tell you that I outgrew cute server names many years ago because they hurt more than they could ever help. Reading this thread, it is painfully obvious to me that most people here have not been meaningfully exposed to large server installations. The last time I had servers with cute names, there were 12 machines total. Since then, I've worked in environments with hundreds and thousands of hosts. Even past a couple dozen servers, cute names become a liability and a significant distraction. Divining purpose, location, and other meaning by looking at a cute name when you have 30 servers is difficult and unnecessary. Applying the 3am standard (can a sleep deprived sysadmin do this task with minimal error at 3am?) cute names actually become rather cruel. The answer is to build an inventory system that lets the sysadmin map cute names to functional information. Or simply build that functional information in to the naming scheme. So sorry guys. As a professional sysadmin and fellow engineer I appreciate that you are looking out for what you perceive to be our sysadmin needs, but cute names are one thing we don't want or need. Unless perhaps you can come up with a justification for renaming the functions and classes in your code with cute names...
theBobMcCormick 17y ago
How is managing boxes named server001 easier than giving the servers, oh, I don't know.... actual NAMES! Are you seriously gonna tell me you manage the boxes with scripts that iterate through the numeric portion of the server names?!? Because if that's the case, your problems are WAAAYYY bigger than just naming convention problems. Names like server001 are great and fine for a cluster of more or less identical, interchangable machines (Beowolf cluster, cluster of VMware hosts, etc.). But it sucks ass for most other circumstances. Seriously. Try having discussions about a project involving a dozen servers (out of hundreds in the company mind you), each with names like server3056, server3087, server3109. It sucks, because 5 minutes after talking about it you find yourself wondering: Hmmm... was I supposed to reboot 3087? or 3078? :-)

dagw 17y ago

The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random. There is often structure and information embedded in the naming scheme, even when it might not be obvious to an outsider. Having someone come in and replace all of that with server001-server999 will often remove information.

blhack 17y ago
The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random. Exactly. For instance, my firewall is called "charon". Personification is a good thing and should be encouraged. It's easier to visualize things that way. From an inside-out perspective (people such as accountants who see everything but, for the most part, do not understand it), naming servers like $function_$row_$rack_$slot or whatever else makes sense...it will simplify things. The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective. Think about it like this: you have things in your kitchen, right? Say you have a toaster, a refrigerator, a mixer, and a microwave. You would NEVER call them things like "appliance_counter1_left", "appliance_floor_right" etc. This would be confusing. It is for this reason that humans give things names; toaster, refrigerator, and mixer are all names, they're just very common ones.
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  If you worked managing a supermarket you would call them City17_shop5_aisle4_refridgerator2. > The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective. That depends - I'd much rather a firewall rule that told me that Glasgow Database Server 2 can talk to London Mail Server 3 for SMTP traffic than one that told me MissPiggy can talk to Kermit for χάρτης traffic. Especially when it's not a system I deal with every day and I haven't cached the name/function mappings in my head. On the other hand, the UK postal system works well with a mixture of numeric sequences (house and flat numbers), cutesy names (road names, city names) and arbitrary government assigned gibberish (Post Codes).

gaius 17y ago

The names aren't random, tho'. The people using the machines every day know that (for example) all the database servers are named after planets, all the web servers are elements of the periodic table, all the development boxes are Muppets characters, etc. It costs nothing and makes your engineers happy. Plus it is intuitive, mistakes of the kind of being logged into the wrong box never happen. I personally have very nearly experienced a disaster because the official naming convention had only one character difference between production and UAT... Anyway, you've missed my point a bit. It doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things what the boxes are called. It DOES matter than your company is employing people to impose pointless, trivial changes and policies on people with real work to do.

Poiesis 17y ago
I much rather prefer managing names rather than codes/numbers. One major reason is that often in a standardized system, the least significant bits are on the right, and at least in Windows often a longer name will be truncated in a display. I don't need many characters to tell one dwarf from another, but to tell names of the type XXYYYNNNNN0-12 from XXYYYNNNNN0-13 is a huge pain sometimes. The big win, though, for a more clinical naming is that shared context/training can be easier, and in a larger org the standardization of course makes things a lot easier to deal with. But of course, standardization can be done with the more whimsical names. And a lot of the time the naming scheme that is drawn up by committee takes just as long to learn as the more fun ones (mostly because they need to be abbreviated a bunch). I suppose the one thing you can say for formal naming systems that is fairly inarguable is that once you understand the rules, you can look at an unfamiliar machine name and know instantly what it does. For machines named after fictional characters that's only true if you read/watch the same books/shows as the people doing the naming.
misterbwong 17y ago
Honestly, the muppets/elements/planets works really well...until there's some turnover. Then the new sysadmin thinks the three stooges should be the db servers and capital cities should be the web servers. Then you end up having conversations like: "Hey, can you move some data up to larry, moe, and saturn? We're building on hydrogen, oxygen, and sacramento." The confusion this causes for new hires and non-natives is real, albeit somewhat comical. edit: ServerXX is no better-the names should give a clue to what function they perform (i.e. IRV-FNP01 = located in irvine, file and print server, 01 [oldest server])

bcl 17y ago

It depends on the number of machines. When I have 3 or 4 they get names (currently using Firefly characters), but when I have say 20 or more they get numbers. Or they get both so that my scripts are easier to write. For me it also depends on function. If its just another app server cloned from the master, it gets a number -- it has no personality. But if it is a backup server, mail server, dev or test system it gets a name.

xiaoma 17y ago

"Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained." That's true. However, humans do better with names than numbers. Otherwise, DNS wouldn't exist. The real question is who do you want to optimize for?

msluyter 17y ago
I think it's dependent on the situation. I enjoy the charm of machines named "frodo" and whatnot, but when I first arrived at my current company, the totally arbitrary naming conventions was highly confusing because we had three environments (dev/stage/prod) and several databases and other classes of server per environment. Now we have a standardized naming convention with names like "dev-foo01", "stage-bar02", "prod-baz01" etc.. (were foo/bar/baz denote the purpose of the machine) and it's much easier to deal with.
- garnet7 17y ago
  dev servers: gnomes staging: dwarves prod: elves
  - whatusername 17y ago
    Sure. But with a DEV_SYD_DB03, UAT_MEL_APP07, PROD_BNE_DB01 kind of scheme, I've got much more information at a glance than you do.
- BerislavLopac 17y ago
  @garnet7, there are no gnomes in LoTR. ;) Or, actually, there are, but they are actually Elves...
  - garnet7 17y ago
    Aw, son of a ... And I can't go back and fix it either! s/gnomes/hobbits/ Well, let's hope no hobbits read this website.

raganwald 17y ago

Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained. I bet you could save $10,000 a year by eliminating the arbitrary names and calling them ServerXXX. Sorry for the attempt at a witty reply. Let's start again. Agreed, there are efficiencies. The point of the article is that when you institute changes like this, you may create unintended consequences like a mass exodus of people who liked working for a company where the servers were named after Muppet characters and associate "Server042" with a company where professional managers demand cover sheets for their TPS reports. Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company?

jodrellblank 17y ago
> Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company? If you knew what the consequences were going to be then they wouldn't be unanticipated, but if you didn't know then you couldn't accurately answer the question. Aren't you just asking people to 'know the unknown unknowns' and never make poor decisions? Wouldn't it be a more realistic suggestion to ask them to ask "Was this good for the company and if not, should we revert to how it was before?"
- gridspy 17y ago
  It is very rare for any individual to completely reverse their previous decision, especially when the results of that decision are subjective, delayed and hard to measure. By the time management realises that soda should have been free, the opinions of the top engineers have irreversibly changed.
- mnemonicsloth 17y ago
  It's an Office Space reference. In the movie, the PHBs hold a meeting in which they solemnly instruct all their employees to ask "Is what I'm doing good for the company?" before they do anything. The audience rolls its eyes in sympathy, for the reasons you've pointed out here.
  - 17y ago

jimbokun 17y ago

How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "server001" vs. "server002" or "server003", etc.? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that?

jodrellblank 17y ago
How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "Feynman" vs. "Fermi" or "Farnsworth"? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that? And what do you call the next server? By contrast, "hq-web-001" is an early webserver at head quarters, while "br1-sql-020" is a later database server at branch office 1, and the next server name is the next in the appropriate sequence.
- aplusbi 17y ago
  "Feynmann", "Fermi" and "Farnsworth" are much better than "server001", "server002" and "server003" but are arguably a step behind "hq-web-001" and "br1-sql-020". I work for a company where most of the servers are just numbered and it's can be rather confusing.

billybob 17y ago

"It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained." I'm not a systems admin, but I presume this is because you can write a for loop that counts through your machines and does something to each, right? In that case, couldn't you just have nested arrays? machines = ['mailservers'=>['Earth'=>'some IP', 'Mars'=>'some IP'],'devservers'=>['Dopey'=>'some IP', 'Sneezy'=>'some IP']] ...etc. Now everyone can connect to a machine with a memorable name, AND you can loop through all the dbservers if you need to, AND anyone who doesn't understand the system can look in one place to grok it. What's the problem?

blueben 17y ago
The problem is that you're not a sysadmin. I'm going to assume that you are a programmer since you are assuming this is simply a programming problem. I am a sysadmin, and I can tell you that I outgrew cute server names many years ago because they hurt more than they could ever help. Reading this thread, it is painfully obvious to me that most people here have not been meaningfully exposed to large server installations. The last time I had servers with cute names, there were 12 machines total. Since then, I've worked in environments with hundreds and thousands of hosts. Even past a couple dozen servers, cute names become a liability and a significant distraction. Divining purpose, location, and other meaning by looking at a cute name when you have 30 servers is difficult and unnecessary. Applying the 3am standard (can a sleep deprived sysadmin do this task with minimal error at 3am?) cute names actually become rather cruel. The answer is to build an inventory system that lets the sysadmin map cute names to functional information. Or simply build that functional information in to the naming scheme. So sorry guys. As a professional sysadmin and fellow engineer I appreciate that you are looking out for what you perceive to be our sysadmin needs, but cute names are one thing we don't want or need. Unless perhaps you can come up with a justification for renaming the functions and classes in your code with cute names...

theBobMcCormick 17y ago

How is managing boxes named server001 easier than giving the servers, oh, I don't know.... actual NAMES! Are you seriously gonna tell me you manage the boxes with scripts that iterate through the numeric portion of the server names?!? Because if that's the case, your problems are WAAAYYY bigger than just naming convention problems. Names like server001 are great and fine for a cluster of more or less identical, interchangable machines (Beowolf cluster, cluster of VMware hosts, etc.). But it sucks ass for most other circumstances. Seriously. Try having discussions about a project involving a dozen servers (out of hundreds in the company mind you), each with names like server3056, server3087, server3109. It sucks, because 5 minutes after talking about it you find yourself wondering: Hmmm... was I supposed to reboot 3087? or 3078? :-)