10 ms·
RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
- EvanAnderson 9y agoThere was an ISP / hosting provider in Dayton, OH, named "donet.com". For years and years their DNS was available for public zone transfers and they had wonderful computer names like powdered, glazed, chocolate, and my favorite, dayold. (Looks like some of those names are still around, too, even after they "rebranded"...)
- _emacsomancer_ 9y agoWith multiple computers on the same network, it's fun (if not productive) to come up with names within a theme (e.g. characters from a novel, place names from some country etc.)
- terrantech 9y agoI've been using character names from my favourite movies. A different movie for each network (or each zone in a network, or however you want to categorise it). Home network is all character names from LOTR, home office is Expanse, etc. It's fun to try pick suitable names from the movie, for the device, eg my HTPC is Gimli, because it's a small case but carries more than its weight. Gaming PC is Gandalf because it's entirely white. Sub-categories of characters is good for sub-categories of devices, so all our phones/tablets are named after the Elves. The main problem with this method is the HOURS you spend angsting over the correct names because it's actually fun.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoI once worked somewhere that used locations from LOTR, but by the time I got there, they were down to obscure things on the map that you wouldn't know if you weren't a true fan.
- RhysU 9y agoIn which Tolkien language do you select the names?
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoWe had servers like Rauros and Caradhras, but all of the newer machines had numbers, since they were well into going virtual when I got there.
- leetcrew 9y agoi use the names of my favorite greek gods/goddesses in a (slightly) meaningful way. my monster tower is ATHENA, the goddess of knowledge. my laptop is ARTEMIS the hunter, and my phone is fleet-footed HERMES.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoThis particular theme is extremely common for servers.
- hydrox24 9y agoThe best thing about this approach is that replacment computers can use related but distinct versions of their ancestor's names. For instance, my old server was called TheQ (i.e. 'Q' from James Bond) and the new one is named Judy, because Judy Dench plays 'M' in the most recent films. It's convoluted, but it's neat to have what is effectively your own mythology.
- cctt23 9y agoI used to enjoy using names from The Wheel of Time series, the forsaken especially. I’ll admit to spending a bit more time than was practical on the endeavor, but I think it sort of helped me “bond” and care more about them? Ah, it was fun at any rate. I miss you, Lanfear!
- fermienrico 9y agoI use elements from the periodic table. The ones that sound cool! Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Neon, Tungsten, Helium, Sodium, etc Wifi names are after noble gases. PC hardware are all stable metals. iPhone/iPad accessories are all non-metals. and finally, random IOT devices are radioactive elements.
- thesephist 9y ago>random IOT devices are radioactive elements. Scheme-compliant _and_ metaphorically apt. Love it.
- andrewflnr 9y agoPlease tell me you're using Technetium for something special.
- howard941 9y agoPerfect for the box doing muscle tissue image processing
- tonyarkles 9y agoMe too on the periodic table names, but with a bit of creativity related to the machine too: - Helium - my Surface 3, because it's light - Lead - my heavy Linux laptop - Lithium - the Mac Mini I bought to keep from going crazy using a decade old Macbook Pro for iOS development - Caesium - my Dell "workstation" Windows laptop, because I bought it to save time (compared to running Windows + Visual Studio in a VM) - Uranium and Thorium - the beefy Xeon workstations that run a bunch of VMs and things - named because they put out so much heat that they might be radioactive
- hashhar 9y agoIt's quite funny that we share the host names Helium and Caesium. My Linux machines are radioactive because I tinker with them a lot and am bound to reinstall every few months.
- jumelles 9y agoYes! This site may be of interest: https://namingschemes.com/ https://namingschemes.com/
- fermienrico 9y agoThis is a gold mine!
- dal 9y agoHope my shitty server won't die now.. I have been planning to migrate this to faster stuff..
- c22 9y agoI've used characters from sesame street, solar system objects, stars (astronomical), colors, and classic car models (with subnets grouped by manufacturer).
- spc476 9y agoBack in college, the CS department used planets. The department I worked in used organ names (brain and pineal being the two I recall). At my previous job, we used city/town names for virtual machines (plenty to choose from, and some quite amusing, like "truth-or-consequences" (in New Mexico for the record)).
- codezero 9y agoInteresting how much of this doesn’t apply in the configuration based cloud world, and how much of it does :)
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoThis reminds me of the Pets vs Cattle analogy https://www.engineyard.com/blog/pets-vs-cattle https://www.engineyard.com/blog/pets-vs-cattle With a pet, you obsess over the name and meaning of the name. With cattle, as long as names don't collide or cause problems, you couldn't care less about the name.
- dghughes 9y agoWell, maybe, as long as you make sure you the bulls and cows are separated.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoDepends how you mean that; I would rather a machine be named prod-app-web-7 than af74b9c. At least mark the cattle by breed!
- SteveNuts 9y agoThat goes against the paradigm. I prefer that my hostnames are ambiguous, that way I'm forced to write tools to automate administrative tasks. If I know the hostname I or my team will be tempted to make one-off changes, breaking the whole "cattle" idea.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deathanatos 9y agoIt is still helpful to have decent names even if you're treating your machines like "cattle" instead of like "pets". Inevitably, some bug will occur, and in my experience, it usually happens to occur on a machine (rather than all of them at once; I'm not saying this machine is special — the bug could have happened on any of them, and likely exists on all of them because they're all running the same code, but this particular machine ended up being the lucky one to serve that slightly unusual request). Getting in and debugging the state of that machine, pulling logs, directing a coworker to look at CPU detail "frobnozz", etc. is all easier if I can easily speak or type out the machine's name. "3.dev.microservice" is much easier to type/speak than say, an IP address, an EC2 instance ID, etc. (I fully agree on not making one-off changes, and not treating machines as pets. But I think that even after that, decent naming has a place.) And even with cattle, the other way, I still think it's useful for the name to provide some information. I.e., 3.prod.microservice being the third or fourth instance of the production setup of "microservice" is better than say, some random entry from the periodic table of elements.
- gorbot 9y agoSomewhat dorky things like this are pretty common in computing and I love it!
- rietta 9y agoNeat. I use the names of moons, like Europa, Io, Callisto, etc.
- Turing_Machine 9y agoIf you needed to name a whole bunch of machines, you could use the list of named minor planets ("asteroids"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_named_minor_planets:_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_named_minor_planets:_A 1,479 just in the letter A.
- excitom 9y agoIt's kind of sad this task has mostly gone away for large datacenters, where choosing names for the thousands of servers is impractical. h223-16-32a just doesn't have same cachet as the carefully selected names.
- rootbear 9y agoNASA has a rigid host naming scheme that is based on the center, the org code, and the property tag number. Fortunately, we can use aliases, or I would go mad.
- relyks 9y agoThis doesn't exactly abide by the RFC but I name all my computers after dead rockstars e.g. "david-bowie", "george-harrison", "jimi-hendrix", "elvis-presley" It's become a tradition of mine :) The lab computers at Rutgers use design patterns, unix commands, and programming languages for the names: https://report.cs.rutgers.edu/nagiosnotes/iLab-machines.html https://report.cs.rutgers.edu/nagiosnotes/iLab-machines.html
- ScottBurson 9y agoI think dead rockstars were used for Lisp machines at the MIT AI Lab back in the 1980s. So you're in good company :-) Personally, I've always been fond of pagan deities.
- fiatjaf 9y agoI use dead Austrian economists: "mises", "menger", "hayek", "lachmann", "kirzner".
- cat199 9y ago... but what if supply can't keep up with demand??
- fuball63 9y agoI use names from the 2003 Cincinnati Bengals roster. I can't wait until I need to use t-j-houshmandzadeh. My cloud hosting account uses players on the active roster; my little hobby home servers use players from the practice squad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Cincinnati_Bengals_season#Roster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Cincinnati_Bengals_season...
- hcs 9y agoA few years ago Rutgers had labs with machines named after breakfast cereals, soups, and pasta: https://web.archive.org/web/20081228003151/http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/resources/systems/ilab/ https://web.archive.org/web/20081228003151/http://www.cs.rut... Also iirc there was a set of servers named after arcade games, zaxxon.cs is still resolving at least.
- protomyth 9y agoWe went with Dakota (not Lakota) names for numbers. Admittedly we might have skipped some of the longer names. Recently we added some named after color. Every department was supposed to find a way to include the language somewhere. [edit: servers only, PCs get names based on room / building]
- Mononokay 9y agoI use space missions. Soyuz--MS-02 for the one I'm currently using.
- rootbear 9y agoI'm a fan of the names of the "First Generation" computers like ENIAC, EDVAC, ILLIAC, etc. My Raspberry Pi honors Pi inventor Eben Upton and is named EBENAC, the Economical British Educational Networked ARM Computer.
- mynameishere 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I Metropolis chose the name MANIAC in the hope of stopping the rash of silly acronyms for machine names,[2] although von Neumann may have suggested the name to him.
- thesephist 9y agoI’ve been running through names of Greek and Roma deities for my machines, which work super well. They can even be themed (all mobile / wireless clients are named after dieties of death).
- JasonFruit 9y agoDo you mean Roman or Roma? I know nothing of Roma folklore.
- mholt 9y ago> For example, amorphous names such as rivers, mythological places and other impossibilities are very suitable. ("earth" is not yet a domain name.) This'll probably be changing soon...
- protomyth 9y agoAlso, don’t use automatically generated names based on a person’s name without a review. Sharon Hiterman[1] will not be amused. 1) not a real person, but a real family name paired with a common first name
- jlgaddis 9y agoWe did this at a former employer and had a librarian with the username "scatt".
- wiseleo 9y agoThere are enough Pokemon to name my servers. ;)
- andy_ppp 9y agoA guy I worked with would name the machines based on the atomic number of the last part of the IP address, i.e. 192.168.1.2 would be helium. Eventually it becomes really annoying, don’t do this.
- oceanman888 9y agoWhy is it annoying? Isn't it easy to tell the IP address?
- freeflight 9y agoOnly if you know the periodic table blind, but this could be a good approach to actually learn it. I'm just not that sure many people want to learn chemistry while administering the IT.
- oceanman888 9y agoHummmm, in Asian we can't graduate high school without memorizing the whole damn thing.
- isostatic 9y agoWhat a useful skill...
- apexalpha 9y agoMy High school forced 2 dead languages on me (Latin, Greek) for 2 years. Think I'd rather have the periodic table.
- delecti 9y agoReally? In my adult life I can't remember the last time it would have been genuinely useful (not just a neat party trick) to have the periodic table memorized, but a sizable chunk of the English language has Latin or Greek roots. I definitely think that's more useful, if only to have a better sense of the language you're speaking.
- tomca32 9y agoI like following a naming theme. I used to be a ballet dancer so I use ballet steps for my machine names: Enterlace, Revoltade, ... They are all single words that are super uncommon outside of the ballet world
- Arbalest 9y agoGood luck getting someone who is unfamiliar with those to spell it out from sound alone. Though with the prevalence of text communication (not seen at the time) this is less of a problem than when this was written.
- tomca32 9y agoYou're totally right. If the voice communication was more crucial, I would definitely think twice before going with this scheme.
- jcranmer 9y agoI ended up with a scheme by accident that is hard both to spell and speak for most people. I don't have many problems with names like mictlantecuhtli, xolotl, or macuilxochitl (well, except for the fact that I can't pronounce consonant final tl and end up with /təl/ instead), but I totally see why others have problems with it. On the plus side, if I ever get one of those "you have a virus" scam calls, I can probably string the caller out for a while trying to get them to spell out the name of the computer that supposedly has the virus...
- zbik 9y agoMy favorite theme was Japanese terms from the game Go (wei-qi). Joseki, fuseki, sente. It was educational as well as distinctive. The spellings are also easier than my other theme of Polish delicacies.
- dpark 9y agoWhen I worked at Yahoo, all personal machines were given a simple two-dictionary-word name. e.g. My desktop was sawbeauty. I always thought this was pretty elegant. All the names were pretty short. There was minimal ambiguity. And it scaled really well.
- EvanAnderson 9y agoAn aside re: Yahoo -- Somewhere I have my website logs from the 1995-96 timeframe. I'll have to try to dig 'em up. I remember the day the site got listed on Yahoo, however. I got hits from machines with names like "scabies.yahoo.com", "ratbastard.yahoo.com", and "srinija.yahoo.com". There were some others, but I can't remember them (scurvy, maybe?). (I remember reading the Wired article about Yahoo in '96, seeing the name "Srinija Srinivasan", and figuring out what that last hostname meant.)
- dpark 9y agoThat’s well before my time at Yahoo. By the time I joined, their IT group preinstalled and named every device with a two-word nonoffensive moniker. By then they weren’t giving out 3rd level domains anymore either. :)
- EvanAnderson 9y agoFound the logs! Woo-hoo! Monday, July 1, 1996 - We got hits from: polio.yahoo.com, pilsner.yahoo.com, mead.yahoo.com, scabies.yahoo.com, ratbastard.yahoo.com, lambic.yahoo.com, stout.yahoo.com, scorpio.yahoo.com, and srinija.yahoo.com. The Wired article had already come out at that point so I must have just remembered Srinija Srinivasan's name from the article. Later in 1996 and in early '97 we got hits from: suppository.yahoo.com, boils.yahoo.com, tuberculosis.yahoo.com, and lobo.yahoo.com. So, I see an alcoholic beverage theme and a disease theme. Yay!
- 52-6F-62 9y agoI've always followed the two-word scheme, but not so random as just the first sci-fi or cartoon names that sprung to mind. Recent incarnations have been: StarshipEnterprise CaptainKirk MysteryMachine Two words seems expedient, and a coupling of 2 + 2 or 2 + 1 syllables (loosely speaking) seems to leech into memory pretty well.
- harrygallagher4 9y agoThe first time I rented a server I was looking around my room to think of a cool hostname and saw “yavapai” on my backpack. Since then I’ve just been using names of Native American tribes.
- wemdyjreichert 9y agoI use rivers of hell from Greek mythology. Cocytus, Acheron, Lethe, Phlegathon, Styx.
- acheron 9y agoUnsurprisingly, I've done this in the past.
- wemdyjreichert 9y agoUsername checks out
- VectorLock 9y agoOne shop I worked at briefly went with "female serial killers" for their naming convention. So you can just imagine the type that worked there.
- oceanman888 9y agoThe Japanese lab I was at name all the machines by Pokemon names. we get to pick which Pokemon we want.
- lisper 9y agoWhen I was at Google I named my machine Myriad. No one seemed to appreciate the subtlety. ;-)
- toomanybeersies 9y agoMy dad used to name computers after characters from Greek mythology. I took the idea and name my computers and devices after Norse mythology. You get some cool names, but there is a fairly critical downside in that a lot of people struggle with spelling the names. Most people probably can't spell Odysseus correctly on the first attempt, and it's even harder to spell Jormungandr correctly. I think that cutesy names like this are fine for personal use, but for commercial use you're better of using a more standardised schema for naming. Another place where companies seem to love cutesy names is meeting rooms. Maybe it's because management wants to sound interesting, or maybe they just like painting bike sheds, but often they like to give non-standard names to meeting rooms, like names of native birds or something else that doesn't describe the room at all. It just makes it hard to remember which room is which. How am I meant to know which room is the Tui room, and which is the Moa room? Either name them by location (e.g. Second Floor, NW), or by distinguishing feature, at one job we had a meeting room with no windows, so we called it the bunker.
- mulmen 9y agoMy first big kid job had the best meeting room names. It was a small company so there were only a handful of rooms to remember and only one floor. Triangle: It was triangular. Rainier: View (or maybe painting?) of Mt. Rainier. Elvis: Blue Suede Chairs. My current office uses normal floor and room numbers for conference room reservations but one of them has an "OUTATIME" CA plate taped to the window and a flux capacitor poster on the wall. We refer to it as "DeLorean".
- moftz 9y agoMy office uses names of famous scientists and engineers for the conference rooms although not all of them are named. At one point, these rooms were listed in Outlook by the person's name instead of the room number. So you would have this massive list of names and have no idea if that room is the one on the next floor or on the other side of the country. They recently redid the conference room directory so now you when you sort alphabetically you can see state, building, floor, room number, then whatever cutesy name the room has.
- 9y ago
- foota 9y agoFwiw I don't think this advice applies well to virtual machines created by things like docker.
- chrissnell 9y agoI registered island.nu when the TLD launched. .nu was the first TLD that you could register under that wasn't a com/net/org or my own country's TLD. All of my machines are named after islands: Mauritius Sable Padre Nauru Jarvis etc.
- tjalfi 9y agoI use uncommon female names that are at least six characters in length. Cirocco - from John Varley's Gaean trilogy Lorelei - from the Styx song
- crgwbr 9y agoFor as long as I can remember, I’ve used ship names from Battlestar Galactica, which are mostly just names from Greek mythology. Galactica, Cerberus, Triton. Pegasus, Valkyrie, Celestus, Prometheus, etc.
- pdkl95 9y agoSee RFC 2100 for additional commentary on naming host: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2100 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2100
- davidw 9y agoInteresting - the author, Don Libes, is also known for Expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Libes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Libes
- TheAceOfHearts 9y agoI use mythological gods when naming my devices. For example: loki, odin, thor, and zeus. I like short and easy to remember names. What naming conventions do people use for storage devices? I recently created a zfs pool and ended up reusing the computer name, but it becomes a bit awkward to say you're opening foo on foo.
- xenophonf 9y agoThis is my favorite naming scheme, although I usually skip the codenames and assign functional names to everything: https://www.mnxsolutions.com/devops/a-proper-server-naming-scheme.html https://www.mnxsolutions.com/devops/a-proper-server-naming-s...
- Turing_Machine 9y agoOne exception where it's actually pretty useful to have a location-specific name: printers (or any other resource where people really need to know the physical location of the device, like DVD burners, 3D printers, or whatever). It's nice to know what room to go to to find your printout. :-) Of course then you do have to make sure to rename it if it gets moved.
- Pxtl 9y agoI stopped reading halfway through the shop example. When you move the machine out of the shop and give it a completely new role, rename it. I call my webserver webserver. I never get why there's such a huge gap between admins and programmers on this. Programmers have sane, intelligent naming conventions beaten into them, and yet when I ask a sysadmin what server the Wiki is running on, half the time the answer is something like "legolas". That name would never make it through my code review.
- sdrothrock 9y ago> I call my webserver webserver. Agreed. Nothing confuses me more than finding a network with a bunch of machines named for roles that they don't fulfill. Even more infuriating is when you have a network like that, but the new machines have names that refer to the old ones -- so for example, the webserver may be "webserver," but the new replacement may be "real-webserver" and then the replacement of that may be "real-webserver-replacement."
- dpark 9y agoThis is precisely why calling the webserver "webserver" isn't a great idea. The guy who called the webserver "webserver" seems kind of lazy. This guy probably isn't going to bother renaming it when it turns into "webserver plus some other services". And if later "webserver" stops hosting the actual webserver because it's overloaded, this guy isn't going to lose sleep calling the new webserver host "real-webserver".
- Pxtl 9y agoImho, there's nothing wrong with throwing a number on the end to denote our 3rd webserver. And obviously, the name is only its primary function. If a sever wears 2 hats, maybe the secondary function isn't in the name. That's still more infromative than "the git repo is on huitzilipotchtli".
- KozmoNau7 9y agoI'm on laptop06, desktop06, phone06, printer02, htpc02 and nas01 at the moment, incrementing the suffix when I replace a machine or add a new one. I tack on "-linux", "-windows", "-android" and so on when appropriate.
- CaliforniaKarl 9y agoFor the FarmShare cluster, systems in version 1 of the cluster were named corn/barley/rye plus some number, for login/compute/GPU systems. The current version of the cluster is named rice/wheat/oat plus a number. It lets us combine some originality in with automatic naming. We’re already thinking about what to do for the next generation. And when we move all of the administrative systems (like the job schedulers) into VMs, we’re thinking of calling the underlying physical hardware quadrotriticale.
- tambourine_man 9y agoThe second hard problem, naming things
- sshine 9y agoI encountered an otherwise ordinary pizza place yesterday that had all its pizzas renamed after stellar objects (stars, star signs, galaxies). Quite amusing except my internal dictionary of well-known pizza names had to be replaced by a linear lookup.
- jessaustin 9y agoIn the past I have used stringed instruments: "lute", "banjo", "dobro", etc. Recently it seems I just have a single Linux box at each location, which server is named "box".
- sk5t 9y agoSome fun CMU computer cluster name themes from the past: * Prisons (statesville, graterford, etc.): Macs * Astronauts (resnik, white, aldrin): DECstations * Disasters (flood, famine, humanity?): More aged DECstations * Climates (tundra, steppe, island): SPARCstation 5s * Characters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's * Wood (elm, pine, smoke): Printers
- cat199 9y agoWasn't this one of the birthplaces of NextStations? any insight there?
- sk5t 9y agoHmm, I can't recall any presence whatsoever of NeXT hardware, nor commingling of NeXT software in the CMU Andrew environment. There was a certain amount of SGI Indigo gear for specialty purposes.
- cat199 9y agocheers.. IIRC I recall hearing something about this due to NeXT (and now apple's) use of CMU Mach.. but universities are big places :b
- scrumper 9y agoI had a personal SPARCstation 5 at university. I named it 'sparky'. I probably could have done better.
- zimpenfish 9y agoLong ago I had an IPX. It was called ... ipx.$domain. Then I got another one. And it was called ... ipy.$domain. You'll never guess what the third one was called...
- sk5t 9y agoBit nasty to name the machine after an obsolete layer 3 protocol, innit?
- aetherspawn 9y agoI have been using starship names from Star Trek since basically forever. enterprise, voyager, relativity, defiant etc
- danaliv 9y agoOn the subject of themes, I’ve always wanted to name a collection of computers with genericized trademarks: like bikini, popsicle, kleenex, or my favorite, thermos!
- mugsie 9y agopersonally, I really hate the "name the machine something cute / funny / in joke". In a previous company, everything was names after Italian towns, and while the IT staff knew what "rome" was, the rest of use had issues decyphering what the hell was happening. This was applied to both VM hosts and VMs, so you had to remember that "livigno" ran VMs x,y,z, and was actually in the backup DC. A later company had a better scheme: Hosts: <service>-<role><number>-<data center>-r<rack ID>-u<rack U location> e.g.: nova-compute0042-uswest-rF20-u23L VMs: <service>-<role><number>-<region>-az<availability zone> e.g. designate-mdns009-uswest-az3 This really does help debuging issues at a glance (e.g. you can see that all VMs in uswest az1 are down at a glance), or directing people to a failed node (replace disk 5 in nova-compute0042-uswest-rF20-u23L is very clear what machine needs maintenance - in the us west DC go to rack f20, and the left hand blade in u23 needs disk 5 swapped).
- XorNot 9y agoThe need to overload hostnames like that to me just says you haven't got your inventory system in order. For the price of actually using my asset DB, my alerts can be sliced and diced exactly by the datacentre/rack/whatever because I'm properly tagging everything. Whereas for all the times I've heard "oh we won't move servers and if we do we'll re-image them..." just last month (and still ongoing) people have been dragging racks between floors, plugging them in and that's it - so fixed names like that get stuck.
- mugsie 9y agoSure - but from the easy of human pattern matching looking a list of hostnames in a monitoring system without needing to click to a different page I think it is worth it. If you are in the habit of moving racks, then I would agree keeping it only in an inventory system makes sense, but that also requires the asset system to be updated when a rack moves - at which point changing a hostname (which can be autogenerated by dhcp based on that system) an easy step to add.
- nurettin 9y ago>> For example, a distributed database had been built on top of several computers This is 1990, amazing awareness of what computers are capable of already.
- moonbug22 9y agoYou do realise at practically all CS was invented before that almost unthinkable ancient time?
- murbard2 9y ago> Random strings are inappropriate for the same reason that they are so useful for passwords. They are hard to remember. "useful" :)
- jjuhl 9y agoI've used norse mythology (using danish versions of names) in the past. The DNS servers were "odin" and "mimer". Webservers were "valhalla" and "udgaard", the DHCP server was "Yggdrasil". Etc.
- HenryBemis 9y agoI was really looking to see if it was April 1st thing back at the time. The RFC was so funny it reminded me of standard random number = 4 [1]. [1]: https://www.xkcd.com/221/ https://www.xkcd.com/221/
- emmelaich 9y agoName things that are the least likely to be misleading. i.e. the thing least likely to change. Which is almost always the physical location. eg. usa-sf-23
- MayeulC 9y agoThe worst choice we've done in terms of host name was for our server at my uni's robotics lab. The lab itself has a strong Tintin theme, and the various computers continue this tradition, with the (french) names Tournesol, Milou, and... Dupont for a random lab computer, while the production server got Dupond (the english equivalents are Thomson and Thompson). While funny, this isn't extremely practical, especially the first few months, while getting accustomed to it. Nowadays, we prefer to name them after something more meaningful, like Archibald [Captain Haddock's first name, fitting for an Arch machine], Winry, or Delphine (Windows and Debian, respectively). This makes easy to identify the machine and its operating system, which I like including in the host name. Overall, I find that having a clear theme helps (to know we are talking about a computer's name), and clear rules for the naming scheme also help, both for picking the name, and guessing its function/characteristics from the name. I would definitely go with some DNS-based convention like the one @zrm mentioned when having to manage bigger clusters or geographically disparate pieces of equipment, though. I would also disagree with something in this RFC: I don't mind tying a hostname to the host function, as I usually reimage/reinstall the operating system when changing it, making it easy to rename it. This also helps with keeping everything modular enough that it can be quickly installed on a new machine, and prevents "ossification" of the various configuration files. This includes giving a replacement computer the same name as the one being replaced. Finally, when managing a truly dynamic cluster (computers that boot a PXE image with little to no local storage, and take their jobs from a control server), I don't even bother naming them, and will choose something semi-random like the MAC address (even a link-local/DHCP address, or the md5 of one of these). As those are temporary identifiers, they are managed dynamically, and do not need to be remembered.
- johannes1234321 9y agoRelated: If you want to name things this Wiki has different proposals: http://namingschemes.com/ http://namingschemes.com/
- makach 9y agoyeah, when I proposed we change to more sensible names for our servers, our admin asked for examples whereupon I answered "i.e. we could name them after planets" his face lights up and says "yeah! like planet01, planet02, planet03.."
- howard941 9y agoI used to name my pets after my pets. Thing is, the boxes outlived the animals. At that point the names become memorials and it's nice to ssh into them. The only glitch so far is it's difficult to decommission the roles.
- scrumper 9y agoMy family's machines at home are all named after fictional robots, names don't get recycled when the boxes die which makes it a fun challenge when a new one arrives. So far we've had: johnnyfive marvin katya gerty kryten robbie Doing our best to avoid dipping into Star Wars laziness. (And HAL is verboten too.)
- WorldMaker 9y agoI've been using "Words that start with Q" since High School and surprisingly haven't recycled a name yet for a machine, and I've gone through nearly a dozen or so. quiddity quilt quasar quantum quack quiz... It's funny how a silly naming rule like that winds up sticking for a couple decades.
- scrumper 9y agoOh that's good. I hope you ban yourself from using dictionaries to help. Our main constraint is that it has to be a robot that my wife, a devout sci-fi sceptic, has heard of. Probably it would make more sense for her machines to be named after obscure British Jacobeans and mine to be robots but since I've paid for all of them, I get to choose.
- tragomaskhalos 9y agoHave worked on a cluster where an explicit prohibition in these guidelines was violated ! The admin decided to name machines after quarks, hence "up", "down", "charm" etc. Can't say it caused any particular issues.
- linsomniac 9y agoI used to do sysadmin consulting, and one of our clients had a new director of IT come in. One of his first orders of business was to have us rename all the hosts (around 100 of them) from role-based names (db01, web01, storage01) to city names. So when an alert came in at 3am that "mulhouse" is down, you had to know that Mulhouse is a French city AND France denotes database machines. And the city names were often fairly obscure, of the 100 names, I had only heard of a handful of them. "Is that name Icelandic or Finnish?" That director of IT didn't last long.
- johnhenry 9y agoI don't think this is the original post that I remember from years ago, but the StarCraft convention has always intrigued me: https://slifty.com/2011/03/starcraft-network/ https://slifty.com/2011/03/starcraft-network/
- kiddico 9y agoI've always named mine after Red vs Blue characters. Laptop=sheila. Desktop=tex. Server=lopez. Names are recycled when the machine is replaced.
- nivenhuh 9y agoQuote from RFC: "Just because a person is named "Don" doesn't mean he is the ruler of the world (despite what the "Choosing a Name for your Baby" books say)." If only the RFC knew what we know now.
- dweekly 9y agoThere are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. One thing to keep in mind here is that naming should be done with a lifetime matching the thing being named. If a given machine might have many roles in its lifetime, asset names ought be separate from role names. So calling a machine db2 might not be a good idea unless you have 100% confidence it will only ever be a database machine. So a62848 could be asset 62848, which then can have all kinds of exciting metadata and services pointing to it that may change over the asset's lifetime without needing to update the host name. Baking metadata into a name is usually going to lead to sadness when later attempting to rename. (While I'm the product manager for Google's datacenter software team I'm not speaking for Google here.)
- e1ven 9y agoGreat points! One of the nice side effects of using the cloud is production systems don't normally change name anymore. I can name a machine db2, and if I don't need it anymore, it's quick to destroy it, and create a new machine of the same size named appserver15.