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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 aft

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.
- JBlue42 9y ago
  >They're also unpronounceable - you can't communicate them to other people verbally quickly or reliably. This is my recent life as I started a (hopefully temporary) phone support role and the place I work has desktops with names like that but also, inexplicably, using all the hard letters in to hear well over the phone. Ex: HPDHHPDEDPD-TS Thanks goodness the folks I'm talking to can use a semblance of the phonetic alphabet.
  - Jaruzel 9y ago
    It's 'horses for courses' - what works for one organisation might not work for another. Scale is also an issue; you can't use clever word based names when you have 50,000 desktops on the estate. Again, in my view (based on several years as a support monkey at the beginning of my career), desktops/laptops should be named based on their asset tags, LT891334 or DT993115 etc. That way, when you ask the user 'what's the machine name' and they have no idea, you can say 'read me the number that's on that big white sticker on the lid'.
    - JBlue42 9y ago
      >Again, in my view (based on several years as a support monkey at the beginning of my career), desktops/laptops should be named based on their asset tags, LT891334 or DT993115 etc. That way, when you ask the user 'what's the machine name' and they have no idea, you can say 'read me the number that's on that big white sticker on the lid'. I wasn't disagreeing with you at all and I really like your solution. I was trying to provide an example of desktops I deal with now that are sometimes impossible to distinguish on the phone without going full NATO alphabet.

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.

JBlue42 9y ago
>They're also unpronounceable - you can't communicate them to other people verbally quickly or reliably. This is my recent life as I started a (hopefully temporary) phone support role and the place I work has desktops with names like that but also, inexplicably, using all the hard letters in to hear well over the phone. Ex: HPDHHPDEDPD-TS Thanks goodness the folks I'm talking to can use a semblance of the phonetic alphabet.
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  It's 'horses for courses' - what works for one organisation might not work for another. Scale is also an issue; you can't use clever word based names when you have 50,000 desktops on the estate. Again, in my view (based on several years as a support monkey at the beginning of my career), desktops/laptops should be named based on their asset tags, LT891334 or DT993115 etc. That way, when you ask the user 'what's the machine name' and they have no idea, you can say 'read me the number that's on that big white sticker on the lid'.
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    >Again, in my view (based on several years as a support monkey at the beginning of my career), desktops/laptops should be named based on their asset tags, LT891334 or DT993115 etc. That way, when you ask the user 'what's the machine name' and they have no idea, you can say 'read me the number that's on that big white sticker on the lid'. I wasn't disagreeing with you at all and I really like your solution. I was trying to provide an example of desktops I deal with now that are sometimes impossible to distinguish on the phone without going full NATO alphabet.