4 ms·

My 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

My 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 ago
My 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 ago
  My 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.
zrm 9y ago
> 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. The thing to keep in mind when doing this, too, is that DNS is a hierarchy. Use that. Many companies have a naming scheme something like EX-AP-NY-FS-1 for Example Corp's Appliance Division's New York Office's File Server number 1. Try fs1.ny.ap.example.com instead. It's much cleaner, and then the New York office can have ny.ap.example.com as a search domain and refer to it as just fs1 even if there is some other fs1 in the San Francisco office. People in SF can still access the New York server and vice versa by using the fully qualified name. It also puts administrative boundaries in the right place, so the appliance division has authority over its own names but not the names belonging to some other division.
msiebuhr 9y ago
I sometimes got quite confused as both my university and hall of residence both had gateways named 'bifrost', 'heimdal' and servers 'thor', 'loke', etc. (I ended up setting different terminal prompts depending on which domain the current machine was under.)
- Insanity 9y ago
  Nice coincidence is that one of the main db servers I work against is bifrost :-)
Jaruzel 9y ago
I actually do this for my personal servers (I'm not your Dad btw). Two decades ago when I only had a handful of servers it seemed a great idea to name them after Greek Gods (on the Zeus family line). I actually stole the concept from the DEC VAXcluster I was working with at the time. Fast forward to present day and everything being virtualised, it's trivial to boot up a new server from a template, and naming each new one has become a massive pain. As I apply a no-reuse rule, I find myself delving deeper and deeper into Greek mythology. I also try to match the name with the purpose, so the God of Messaging (Hermes) is my Mail Server, Zeus is the Hyper-V host for all his offspring etc. It all made sense at conception, but now I've got ~40 servers doing various things, and half the time I can't remember which is which. :( However... In a professional environment[1] I have lost SO many hours in pointless 'naming convention' arguments. Everyone has a different view as to how it should be done. My view is to pick the defining characteristics of the servers; Is location important? Are they single role servers? Are they lab or production? Do they belong to specific part of the business? For example: 'LDNTCADSP001' breaks down into {location}{datacentre}{role}{lab/prod}{unit-number} * Don't use wasted character like dashes as depending on your systems you've only got X characters to play with. * Sysadmins should always be able to identify at a glance what the server does, and where it is without having to fire up a CMDB. -- [1] I've held senior roles in several major global Banks, where my teams managed several hundred servers on average. So this is a real-world viewpoint.
- XorNot 9y ago
  LDNTCADSP001 - I hate names like this. It's untypable on a command line since you have to shoot all over the keyboard, and it probably won't auto-complete until you get to the last number. There's other subtle problems to: its not sparse enough for the same reason. You're putting a lot of stock in an operator always seeing the right sequence of numbers, especially if your fleet grows and you now have a LDNTCADSP101 and LDNTCADSP110 for example. They're also unpronounceable - you can't communicate them to other people verbally quickly or reliably. The best thing we've currently done at my work is assign single-use mnemonic names to all the servers (and, I'm pushing for it to be everything) - so we have "subsidy", "until", "wedding", "opulent" as server names. Easy to remember when you're debugging, easy to say, and a sparse namespace - you're exceedingly unlikely to mistake one for the other, and they'll autocomplete easily. It plays right into the human associative memory too.

mulmen 9y ago

My 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 ago
My 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.

zrm 9y ago

> 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. The thing to keep in mind when doing this, too, is that DNS is a hierarchy. Use that. Many companies have a naming scheme something like EX-AP-NY-FS-1 for Example Corp's Appliance Division's New York Office's File Server number 1. Try fs1.ny.ap.example.com instead. It's much cleaner, and then the New York office can have ny.ap.example.com as a search domain and refer to it as just fs1 even if there is some other fs1 in the San Francisco office. People in SF can still access the New York server and vice versa by using the fully qualified name. It also puts administrative boundaries in the right place, so the appliance division has authority over its own names but not the names belonging to some other division.

msiebuhr 9y ago

I sometimes got quite confused as both my university and hall of residence both had gateways named 'bifrost', 'heimdal' and servers 'thor', 'loke', etc. (I ended up setting different terminal prompts depending on which domain the current machine was under.)

Insanity 9y ago
Nice coincidence is that one of the main db servers I work against is bifrost :-)

Jaruzel 9y ago

I actually do this for my personal servers (I'm not your Dad btw). Two decades ago when I only had a handful of servers it seemed a great idea to name them after Greek Gods (on the Zeus family line). I actually stole the concept from the DEC VAXcluster I was working with at the time. Fast forward to present day and everything being virtualised, it's trivial to boot up a new server from a template, and naming each new one has become a massive pain. As I apply a no-reuse rule, I find myself delving deeper and deeper into Greek mythology. I also try to match the name with the purpose, so the God of Messaging (Hermes) is my Mail Server, Zeus is the Hyper-V host for all his offspring etc. It all made sense at conception, but now I've got ~40 servers doing various things, and half the time I can't remember which is which. :( However... In a professional environment[1] I have lost SO many hours in pointless 'naming convention' arguments. Everyone has a different view as to how it should be done. My view is to pick the defining characteristics of the servers; Is location important? Are they single role servers? Are they lab or production? Do they belong to specific part of the business? For example: 'LDNTCADSP001' breaks down into {location}{datacentre}{role}{lab/prod}{unit-number} * Don't use wasted character like dashes as depending on your systems you've only got X characters to play with. * Sysadmins should always be able to identify at a glance what the server does, and where it is without having to fire up a CMDB. -- [1] I've held senior roles in several major global Banks, where my teams managed several hundred servers on average. So this is a real-world viewpoint.

XorNot 9y ago
LDNTCADSP001 - I hate names like this. It's untypable on a command line since you have to shoot all over the keyboard, and it probably won't auto-complete until you get to the last number. There's other subtle problems to: its not sparse enough for the same reason. You're putting a lot of stock in an operator always seeing the right sequence of numbers, especially if your fleet grows and you now have a LDNTCADSP101 and LDNTCADSP110 for example. They're also unpronounceable - you can't communicate them to other people verbally quickly or reliably. The best thing we've currently done at my work is assign single-use mnemonic names to all the servers (and, I'm pushing for it to be everything) - so we have "subsidy", "until", "wedding", "opulent" as server names. Easy to remember when you're debugging, easy to say, and a sparse namespace - you're exceedingly unlikely to mistake one for the other, and they'll autocomplete easily. It plays right into the human associative memory too.