4 ms·

When this came up before I liked the comment from an ex-dropbox employee on how dropbox found positional hostnames to be a the best solution: https://news.ycomb

• robaato 12y ago
  I worked in the field of infrastructure documentation for a while, applying configuration management principles to it. Naming is very important and often done poorly. The positional scheme you link to works very well. You need to label things, and bear in mind that you might be asking some outsourced third party "pair of hands" who has no knowleged of your environment to reboot a box - you want to be sure it's the right one! Active equipment like servers often have naming conventions around function etc, but consider what happens if someone remotely renames the server and its physical label is ot updated... For passive equipment, e.g. patch panels, we recommended a suffix indicating U position (being consistent about whether U's coount from the bottom, and which edge defines the U position). Most places start with U1 as the bottom U position, and equipment that might take up Us 1&2 is defined as being in U1 (bottom edge). Alternatives OK, but be clear and consistent. Many organisations are not definitive on location ids, down to city, name of building within the city, even the names of rooms within a building - multipe names often used! Examples might be: LON-DOCK1-DC1-AA02-PP-U41 LON-DOCK1-DC1-AB02-SW-U23 Sometimes: SVR-LON-DOCK1-DC1-AB03-U01 (without U suffix is fine for such kit often) Lots of fun in this area!