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A couple neat things about using chemical elements as hostnames
- daniel-cussen 16y ago"I admit this naming convention is more for the massive nerd factor than practicality." Epic.
- nnutter 16y agoI like that there is consistency in naming them when considering the periodic table. However, most people don't know the table well enough to know their atomic number, their classification (noble gas, halogen, etc.) nor would there be any connection between name and purpose. Rather you must know the meta-information about the element to know the purpose which makes this a well-suited convention for chemists but few others.
- js2 16y agoUsually the hostname should be disconnected from the machine's purpose. Instead, use a generic name and then use aliases (either cnames or additional A records) for mapping services to the machine.
- aaronblohowiak 16y agothis! i like it when the hostname is the physical location of the box, and then aliases to map services to the box, like you suggest.
- spiffytech 16y agoI don't think nnutter meant naming machines by their purpose like "mail.localdomain", "www.localdomain", etc. Rather, for example, I once named a QA build-testing machine "yaeger" after the test pilot that broke the sound barrier. Hostnames whose namesake has similar traits (even vaguely) to the machine's purpose can help you remember which machine performs what task on your network, or recall what a machine's purpose is by it's hostname. Careful selection of such names provides these benefits without causing any more problems when you move a service to another machine than using any other naming scheme.
- baddox 16y agoThis would be a good way to learn.
- sketerpot 16y agoA periodic table will make the atomic number and element type easy to look up. You can get it on coffee mugs. It'll be fun.
- theBobMcCormick 16y agoIt's gonna be a disaster if they ever need to re-address for any reason.
- js2 16y agoThe last sentence should be the first: “If you have more than about 20 machines, just give them numbered hostnames and be done with it.”
- theBobMcCormick 16y agoThe problem with numbered hostnames is that it's very difficult to remember which host is which, even in the course of very short projects (was that ser0483 or ser0438 that needed rebooted?) etc. Although I'll grant you that numbered hostnames is probably the only workable alternative for a large farm of otherwise identical servers (VMWare server farm, rendering farm, etc.)
- ghshephard 16y agoI've never found numeric names to be a problem. And there is _never_ a problem with how to spell the name. I will take "ssh m435.local.domain" over (real world example, ARGH) "ssh Vanaheimr.local.domain." and "ssh Muspellheim.local.domain" - I want to shoot people who think that's clever.
- chrismealy 16y agoI did this back in 1995. I still remember the first three hosts: mercury, carbon, helium ...
- Hoff 16y agoOverloading the names? Classifications as functional groups? Um. Ok. That's, um, interesting. If you start with chemical names and hit the limits of the complexity that permits, are you going to move onward to molecules? Wait for Ununbium to be renamed Copernicium? What's next, molecular host names within the hydroxyl group are assigned to management? If you're going to use a "corporate-style" naming scheme for your hosts, then just encode whatever it is you want to convey into the host name. Location or whatever. Or just select random names. Having the IP address encoded in the name strikes me as particularly problematic, too. Hosts and subnets and VLANs tend to come and go, and names and VLANs and address assignments tend to shift. And naming based on physical locality is an increasingly quaint concept in the era of virtualization and client mobility. After a while, most any naming scheme will prove insufficient or will unravel, so why not just have an eye toward the likelihood of distributed management and (increasing) complexity from the onset? Seems better to spend your time getting (for instance) SNMP and DNS records configured and working for all your boxes, and less time making (more) work for yourself with explaining and maintaining complex host name schemes.
- Jach 16y agoAs the article states: "I admit this naming convention is more for the massive nerd factor than practicality. If you have more than about 20 machines, just give them numbered hostnames and be done with it."
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoSeems like this extends to domain names too. SO why even have an address bar at the top of the browser? What will replace it?
- Hoff 16y agoMany browsers have two text input boxes. In more than a few places, a Google search string (or the browser's search input box) is the already the preferred contact path; not the URL. What might replace URL-based navigation more widely, I don't know. We went from ARPA not all that long ago to the Big Seven to however many dozens of TLDs we have now. We'll certainly find out, as the URLs are increasingly hideous, and we're just a few years into this current naming structure. There are certainly potential business opportunities here, too. Approaches to better solve a distributed planetary-scale address book than "just" based on a domain name, and better than a brute-force search engine.
- poundy 16y agoThis gives purpose to all the years of Chemistry I learned at school.. Thank you!
- tahu 16y agoYes, this is the PERFECT plan. But how do I name my router at 192.168.1.254?
- sjs 16y agoYou name the new element of course. perhaps tahunium? ;-)
- pohl 16y agounobtanium, adamantium, mithrilium, ...? Edit: imodium?
- wrs 16y agoI believe that would be "bipentquadium". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_element_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_element_name)
- tahu 16y agoVery good. Now I can safely append 192.168.1.254 bipentquadium bpq Thanks.
- Goladus 16y agoNumbered hostnames are fine if you've got a cluster of identical machines such that there's not much value in differentiation. 'xyz241' is a test router 'xyz211' is a second test router 'xyz262' is a production webserver 'xyz546' is a production webserver 'xyz33' is a development database server 'xyz411' is a development database server for a temporary contract dev team. 'xyz101' is the corporate file server If you have hundreds of devices to track, the weaknesses of using numbers should be apparent. The only advantage of that naming scheme is organization of the entire monolithic collection. It's easy to select new names and it is easy to enumerate the entire collection at once. Those are definitely advantages, but there are some obvious drawbacks, too. There's no obvious way to tell, short of committing it to memory, that "546" is a webserver. To track of any other pattern, you'll have to encode some sort of information into the names. For example, you could organize the numbers, like most colleges do for classes. <subj> <level-number> * 100 + <course-number>. eg: MUSC 211.
- bobbyi 16y agoI would find it easier to remember that the 400's are webservers than that the pnictogens are webservers. You can also make the even/ oddness of the numbers significant like interstate highways. For practicality, you would combine meaningful names (for the groupings) with numbers (web3, dev5, router2) rather than bijecting the entirety of your company's assets onto a set of integers.
- sprout 16y agoMeaningful names are fine if you have enough servers that every single server can do one thing. But in smaller circumstances the 'web' server may need to do decidedly non-web tasks. And it's difficult to know this in advance, so trying to name things meaningfully will only cause confusion when someone discovers that the database server is running apache or the web server is hosting the local office nfs mounts. I like the use of something like elements because it lets you use the character of the element as a sort of metaphor for the function of the server - but since it's a metaphor and not a clear name it's understood that you can't rely on the name to know what the server does, and you should keep it documented.
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- floodfx 16y agonaming servers is so BAWS (before AWS). :)
- dnsworks 16y agoCute hostnames are pretty obnoxious. My preferred method of building out datacenters is more self-documenting, and I've done it on 4 rack colo buildouts and 100 rack colo build-outs. I just use a naming format of Loc-Cabinet-Rackspace. In my Seattle datacenter I know that sea-c01-s1 is a server thats in my seattle datacenter, cabinet 1, slot 1. I know it's PDUs are plugged into port 1 of PDU-LEFT and PDU-RIGHT in that cabint. I know it's two ethernet ports are plugged into Port 1 sea-c01-sw-left and sea-c02-sw-right. I know it's LOM cable is plugged into port 1 of sea-c01-sw-mgmt. (I handle multi-U spaces by naming the server based on the bottom most rackspace it uses, and I stay consistent. If Sea-c01-s1 takes 10 rackspaces, then the server above it is sea-c01-s11. Beyond that, my configuration management tools tag spare resources when needed, and release them when unneeded. Cute hostnames are of no use to me, or anybody building out a datacenter that they'd like somebody else to be able to manage without months of knowledge dump.
- chime 16y agoWhat happens when you have to move a server for some reason? Has that never happened?
- spc476 16y agoMy guess: logical names (like www or db or ns) are CNAMES, so that when the server moves and gets a new named based on location, the CNAME is adjusted as well.
- andrewtj 16y agoYep — exactly. To use software parlance, if using this convention would halt or inconvenience your production, it's a smell and a likely indication you've got a spaghetti setup on your hands.
- gaius 16y agoYou shouldn't need to rename a server when you move it, esp. since you might not know where its hostname is used (e.g. at least one major database vendor at software installation time embeds the hostname in various generated config files). Machines should have sequential names, services should be VIPs (or CNAMEs if you must) and everything else should be in a configuration management database.
- lsc 16y agoNaming is a classic bikeshed. Sure, a good naming system is a good thing, and helps you recognize what box is where. But once you hit between 20 and 200 hosts (depending on your memory) you are going to need to stick 'em in a database and sort 'em into groups to manage them in a sane manner anyhow, and at that point, naming schemes won't mean much anyhow. The problem is that as a bikeshed, /everyone/ has an opinion and everyone wants to have that opinion heard. I've been places where we spent more effort arguing about naming schemes than it would have taken to write the database and tools for retrieving groups of hosts. So generally, when this comes up in situations where I'm in charge, I loudly declare it a bikeshed, and we choose the scheme essentially at random.
- dasil003 16y agoDeclaring bikeshed should be like calling shotgun--whoever declares it should make the decision.
- reitzensteinm 16y agoBut... what if they make the wrong decision!? I think we need more time to consider our options here.
- ErrantX 16y agoWe have several very very large clusters - as you say, the names become problematic. Currently we are using a "code" to ID servers. - 2 letter geographical location code - 2 letter building code - 4 number computer ID (e.g. LIMB0001) This was after someone had to spend nearly a whole day working out where computer CU2043 was located :)
- lsc 16y agoyeah. every time i've worked on multi-thousand box clusters you always did operations on sets of servers... and you'd grab those sets using a tool that would pull from a database. if you got an alert for a particular server, you'd go back into the database and you could then pull up all details you have for that server, including how to access it physically or remotely. My current setup is approaching the 'need a database' scale... (we're at around 60 physical servers I've gotta deal with, if you count co-lo customer boxes, and maybe another 20 virtuals we manage. We've got around 1300 customer virtuals that I don't name or manage. so dealing with that database, either by massaging freeside until it can do what we need to do, or writing something else is one of our next projects.)
- mhd 16y agoAt my current job, we've switched from Star Wars characters to colors. While I can understand that having a testing machine called "jarjar" is a bit, well, jarring to those with less geeky proclivities. But mentally associating colors to certain servers is a bit too bland. Maybe that's just the way my brain works… (Worst sin I've commited, name-wise: Naming my desktop PC dunsinane and my laptop birnham)
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- jm3 16y agowe do this as well; the inspiration came from the engineering machine names at umich.edu. Edit: umich had a lot of funny machine names. The login servers were named for console video games (galaga, moonpatrol, galaxian), while the kerberos servers were (inexplicably) named for schwarzenegger movies: terminator, redheat, lastactionhero, etc.
- mikedmiked 16y agoI like to use Pokemon names, as the numbers of those first 151 have stuck in my head for many years for some reason. You can subdivide them in many memorable ways too, e.g. the author could say: "On my network, pikachu is my router, rack-mount servers are fire-type pokemon, embedded devices are water, gaming consoles are dragon, and laptops are ground type." It would also has the advantage that you could use redily available pokemon stickers to attach to each device, and is a nice way to personify devices if you are so inclined - "Ivysaur is playing up again; time for a trip to the pokecentre"
- graywh 16y agoLaptops should be flying type. Then embedded devices can be ground type.
- jcapote 16y agoJust refer to the RFC: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html
- mprovost 16y agoThis is great for highly connected devices like routers and switches because each element has an unambiguous abbreviation which makes labeling cables much easier.
- noonespecial 16y agoWe've solved it by having the actual hostname be the mac address from the machines first NIC preceded by a 2 character code for what type of machine it is (DT for desktop, VM for virtual etc) and then allowing for the assignment of an "administrative" name that goes in the internal DNS and is shown in green on the command line when logged in. This lets the suits pick goofy names for their boxes based on whatever they've seen on tv recently and allows us to automatically generate unique hostnames based on physical properties of the actual machines. The sweet lack of multiple "Gimli's" and "Gandalf's" on my network warms my geek heart.
- ghshephard 16y agoThis becomes somewhat more problematic (but not impossible) when you need to start replacing NICs, and moving MAC addresses over to new servers. Some linux IPv6 stacks (RHEL) tend to work better in autoconf mode (EUI-64 promotion of their MAC address) - particularly across multiple versions of the kernel (Static addressing has given us problem) - so we tend to do the migration of IPv6 addressing by changing the MAC address on the NIC, which, ironically, offers more straightforward and predictable behavior across multiple RHEL 5 releases than trying to force a particular static IPv6 address onto the host. If you end up having to play games with your MAC addresses, basing hostnames on them is a suboptimal strategy. Asset tags, on the other hand.....
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- socksy 16y agoIn my household, we've found that place names can be useful for memorable and informative hostnames. Servers in the garage: Japanese cities. Upstairs northern places (being English we use Scottish cities), basement Australian, and the central computer is Rome. After all, all roads lead to Rome!