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personally, I really hate the "name the machine something cute / funny / in joke". In a previous company, everything was names after Italian towns, and while th

by mugsie 9y ago

personally, 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Sure - 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.

by mugsie 9y ago

XorNot 9y ago

The 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 ago
Sure - 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.