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Okay, but a lot more people own pets than own cattle. In the computer sense as well.
by rspeer 9y ago
Okay, but a lot more people own pets than own cattle. In the computer sense as well.
- khedoros1 9y agoI've got about 5 computers at home. Most of them have "pet" names. I've got about 500 computers at work. Have fun treating them as anything but cattle.
- cam_l 9y agoI have known dairy farmers to name each one of their 4-500 head personally. Never seen that with beef cattle farmers though..
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mulmen 9y agoWhat kind of cattle do you think servers most resemble?
- cam_l 9y agoHa! Excellent point. Though with all the milking machines hooked up the dairy cows probably look more like them visually speaking.. And these days servers might be more metaphorically close, increasingly, to just the beef itself. Decentralised, to somewhat stretch the analogy.
- laumars 9y agoIf the servers are immutable (eg in auto-scale groups) then it's more like beef cattle because you don't expect your servers / cattle to survive to old age. If they are any servers that cannot be auto created / destroyed without human oversight - or if their downtime breaks other resources along the chain (eg non-clustered DB server) then I'd argue those servers are a little more like dairy cattle.
- twic 9y agoGoats.
- stuntbagder 9y agohow long before all the servers get foot and mouth and you have to put them all down .. ?
- jasonkester 9y agoI've personally eaten a roast from a cow named Luke, at a beef farmer's house. It certainly happens. He was tasty.
- glenneroo 9y agoReread his comment. You are the exception. I would even venture to say that a lot of HN users are also exceptions, but neither HN nor IT administrators are most people.
- isostatic 9y agoHN is based around web based work, databases, webservers, load balancing, stuff that can (or does) run in VMs in clouds. If that's stuff that can be automated, then great, you don't need to know the IP, let alone have a hostname. Most of the general purpose computers (and certainly the vast majority of devices with an IP) I deal with have real world interfaces, SDI ports and/or analog/digital audio connections. I'm not going to give my encoder in Nairobi a name that doesn't say "Nairobi Encoder" (PTR returns NRB-ENC001-obe, forward lookup for NRB-ENC001), same with encoder 2 at New Scotland Yard, and the same with the ntop/monitoring box I have in the New York office. I can't self heal equipment when a lorry drives into it, but I need to know that it's the Old Bailey monitoring box that's broken.
- khedoros1 9y ago> Reread his comment. Thank you for implying that I didn't know exactly what I was responding to, and that I didn't read it carefully. The grandparent to my comment mentioned the cattle-pet distinction. The parent comment took that as some kind of statement of how common each situation is. I replied in a similarly loosely-connected manner, trying to reinforce the grandparent comment's point. I fully understand that "cattle-owners" are less common, and that that's part of what the parent comment was saying. Reread the comment that they replied to, and reinterpret my comment as a reiteration of the grandparent comment, phrased in a different way.