Yeah, I name everything for what it is and as short as I can get away with. Desptop / laptops are company name - office - then a number. So something like NRONDal08
Yeah, I name everything for what it is and as short as I can get away with. Desptop / laptops are company name - office - then a number. So something like NRONDal08
This one's for the sysadmins. Even if you just have a few different machines at home, chances are you've been called upon to name them so you can tell them apart and not have to ID them by IP...
This one's for the sysadmins. Even if you just have a few different machines at home, chances are you've been called upon to name them so you can tell them apart and not have to ID them by IP address.
At home, I call my laptop "imaginos" and my desktop "desdinova", and my wife's laptop is named "christabel". We're both BÖC fans so it works.
At one of my day jobs I managed to get away with naming an entire project's machines after Final Fantasy IV characters, so that we had workstations named "cecil", "kain", "rosa", "palom", "porom", etc., and servers named "scarmiglione", "cagnazzo", "barbariccia", "rubicante", and "golbeza". I even named the founder's machine "zeromus", and told him that it was because he was the founder and started from zero.
Probably shouldn't use semantically meaningless obscure references as server names in a professional environment. It causes negative externalities like creating an exclusionary cultural...
Probably shouldn't use semantically meaningless obscure references as server names in a professional environment. It causes negative externalities like creating an exclusionary cultural environment, increases cognitive cost of training/onboarding/maintaining/scaling systems, etc..
That's true, but I neither knew about such considerations nor had any particular reason to care about them at 22. I had more pressing concerns at the time, like getting a bunch of machines up and...
Probably shouldn't use semantically meaningless obscure references as server names in a professional environment. It causes negative externalities like creating an exclusionary cultural environment, increases cognitive cost of training/onboarding/maintaining/scaling systems, etc..
That's true, but I neither knew about such considerations nor had any particular reason to care about them at 22. I had more pressing concerns at the time, like getting a bunch of machines up and running ASAP so I could get paid, and pay my bills in turn. I need a pool of short, memorable (to me at least) names, and the cast of FFIV was the second thing to spring to mind. The first were the seventy-two demons of the Goetia from the Lesser Key of Solomon.
In my defense, I thoroughly documented everything I did and my rationale for doing what I did at the time.
Speaking from experience, people remember real names much more readily than obfuscated names. This is helpful when a server has many functions. What would you call an Apache Tomcat + WordPress +...
Speaking from experience, people remember real names much more readily than obfuscated names. This is helpful when a server has many functions. What would you call an Apache Tomcat + WordPress + MySQL server? We called it Phoenix, and the Indians, African Americans, and Columbians I worked with felt in no way culturally excluded. In fact, they preferred the name over 'lx0127.'
We used classic greek for the most part. Hermes for the exchange email, Athena for the domain controller, Sisyphus was the project server, Hades was the firewall (followed by Charon and Cerberus),...
We used classic greek for the most part. Hermes for the exchange email, Athena for the domain controller, Sisyphus was the project server, Hades was the firewall (followed by Charon and Cerberus), our first failover SAN clusters were Icarus and Daedalus. Due to an ancient grandfathering the only exception was the company file server, Godzilla.
All the customer-facing systems were named after their projects, though. Greek names were for in-house support/business systems only. User machines were first initial last name and a number, so I knew who's desk to go sit on when something funky showed up in the logs.
Frankly, I hate the pointless-segmented-name format. I don't need the name to know where it is and what it does, that info is in the domain records and dhcp reservations. I can tell the function and location just by the IP address, as god intended. Granted, I never had to manage more than about 130 servers at once, if I were managing 50,000 I'd probably have to change... careers.
Agreed that messing around at work should be frowned upon, but the home network is a LAN party. SSIDs like "FreshHell" (as in Dorothy Parker's famous line, "What fresh hell is this?"), hostnames...
Agreed that messing around at work should be frowned upon, but the home network is a LAN party. SSIDs like "FreshHell" (as in Dorothy Parker's famous line, "What fresh hell is this?"), hostnames like "FAILBox", "tarpit", "Altair", "Procyon", ""Sirius", "Regulus", "Amoeba", "Chronos", "Macron", "Mutant", "Oracle", "Vulch", ""Zombie" - all fair game.
I agree that server names in this climate of just "anything can be used against you" you should stick to "company, etc,etc,etc" back in the early WWW it was a free for all. I loved it. now...
I agree that server names in this climate of just "anything can be used against you" you should stick to "company, etc,etc,etc"
back in the early WWW it was a free for all. I loved it. now everything is just shit.
My current job, my manager names all the workstations and servers after minerals, with precious/rare minerals for the servers. I thought it would get confusing, but after awhile I got used to it....
My current job, my manager names all the workstations and servers after minerals, with precious/rare minerals for the servers. I thought it would get confusing, but after awhile I got used to it.
When trying to have a conversation its must easier to say ZIRCON is down, instead of WS-OPS-002
Exactly! Conincidentally, all my current computers are named for FFIV characters as well (I'm typing on scarmiglione right now) and it makes it much easier to identify them when something goes awry.
Exactly! Conincidentally, all my current computers are named for FFIV characters as well (I'm typing on scarmiglione right now) and it makes it much easier to identify them when something goes awry.
My machines are named after corners on classic racetracks. Initially it was just the nordschleife, with 'bergwerk', 'flugplatz', and 'adenauer', but with my new laptop I branched out to use...
My machines are named after corners on classic racetracks. Initially it was just the nordschleife, with 'bergwerk', 'flugplatz', and 'adenauer', but with my new laptop I branched out to use 'mulsanne'.
When I first started at my current company they used muppet names for most servers at the facility I worked at. Things have grown since then, when you have 1,500+ servers to manage picking cool...
When I first started at my current company they used muppet names for most servers at the facility I worked at. Things have grown since then, when you have 1,500+ servers to manage picking cool names really doesn't work. Aside from the difficulty in always having to look up what servers do what and just plain running out of ideas, really it comes down to "ain't nobody got time for that". It is kind of sad really, I still remember the day Elmo was retired and the last of the muppet servers was relegated to the recycling pallet, replace by a boring CHI-MAIL-04.
Many of may machines were named after characters or notable keywords off the show Magnum P.I. Mostly innocuous, though eventually I snapped out of it and got boring.
Many of may machines were named after characters or notable keywords off the show Magnum P.I. Mostly innocuous, though eventually I snapped out of it and got boring.
I've been a sys admin for 30 years now. I've seen all sorts of naming conventions. A nation wide (hint, hint) insurance company I worked for, used mythology for their Netware servers. Greek,...
I've been a sys admin for 30 years now. I've seen all sorts of naming conventions. A nation wide (hint, hint) insurance company I worked for, used mythology for their Netware servers. Greek, Roman, you name it. All the gods and heroes.
Security conscious mindset is to never use an identifying name. So no Database001, no FileServer001, no PrintServer001. No Peoplesoft01, or MAIL001.
My preferred convention is Location-Function-Number. Based on your size, that could be site based, city based, state based, etc. And APP, FIL, SQL, UCS, etc. Example: CMH-APP-001, CMH-APP-002. Or use 4-digit numbering if you think you'll end up with 9999 servers in a category.
For user's computers, mostly just use the serial number or service tag or even again something like cmh-lap-001, cmh-des-001.
Are there sysadmins who actually do this? I've been in the game a while, and only ever seen logical hostnames which quickly provide information on what a server is. You just can't go wrong with...
Are there sysadmins who actually do this? I've been in the game a while, and only ever seen logical hostnames which quickly provide information on what a server is.
You just can't go wrong with something like [domain]-[location]-[function]-[number]. For example, CN-BRIS-DB-01 to represent [Corporate Network]-[Brisbane]-[Database]-[Primary server]. Even in our non-production environment we try to follow the standard as close as possible.
For my home network I use simply identifiers like transcoder, dc (for domain controller), webserver etc.
You can do both and call servers something like "LGI-DC-01-Unicorn".
Yeah, I name everything for what it is and as short as I can get away with. Desptop / laptops are company name - office - then a number. So something like NRONDal08
This one's for the sysadmins. Even if you just have a few different machines at home, chances are you've been called upon to name them so you can tell them apart and not have to ID them by IP address.
At home, I call my laptop "imaginos" and my desktop "desdinova", and my wife's laptop is named "christabel". We're both BÖC fans so it works.
At one of my day jobs I managed to get away with naming an entire project's machines after Final Fantasy IV characters, so that we had workstations named "cecil", "kain", "rosa", "palom", "porom", etc., and servers named "scarmiglione", "cagnazzo", "barbariccia", "rubicante", and "golbeza". I even named the founder's machine "zeromus", and told him that it was because he was the founder and started from zero.
For a while I had my home desktops named after the supercomputers in Neon Genesis Evangelion: Balthazar, Melchior, and Casper.
Classic.
Probably shouldn't use semantically meaningless obscure references as server names in a professional environment. It causes negative externalities like creating an exclusionary cultural environment, increases cognitive cost of training/onboarding/maintaining/scaling systems, etc..
That's true, but I neither knew about such considerations nor had any particular reason to care about them at 22. I had more pressing concerns at the time, like getting a bunch of machines up and running ASAP so I could get paid, and pay my bills in turn. I need a pool of short, memorable (to me at least) names, and the cast of FFIV was the second thing to spring to mind. The first were the seventy-two demons of the Goetia from the Lesser Key of Solomon.
In my defense, I thoroughly documented everything I did and my rationale for doing what I did at the time.
Speaking from experience, people remember real names much more readily than obfuscated names. This is helpful when a server has many functions. What would you call an Apache Tomcat + WordPress + MySQL server? We called it Phoenix, and the Indians, African Americans, and Columbians I worked with felt in no way culturally excluded. In fact, they preferred the name over 'lx0127.'
We used classic greek for the most part. Hermes for the exchange email, Athena for the domain controller, Sisyphus was the project server, Hades was the firewall (followed by Charon and Cerberus), our first failover SAN clusters were Icarus and Daedalus. Due to an ancient grandfathering the only exception was the company file server, Godzilla.
All the customer-facing systems were named after their projects, though. Greek names were for in-house support/business systems only. User machines were first initial last name and a number, so I knew who's desk to go sit on when something funky showed up in the logs.
Frankly, I hate the pointless-segmented-name format. I don't need the name to know where it is and what it does, that info is in the domain records and dhcp reservations. I can tell the function and location just by the IP address, as god intended. Granted, I never had to manage more than about 130 servers at once, if I were managing 50,000 I'd probably have to change... careers.
Agreed that messing around at work should be frowned upon, but the home network is a LAN party. SSIDs like "FreshHell" (as in Dorothy Parker's famous line, "What fresh hell is this?"), hostnames like "FAILBox", "tarpit", "Altair", "Procyon", ""Sirius", "Regulus", "Amoeba", "Chronos", "Macron", "Mutant", "Oracle", "Vulch", ""Zombie" - all fair game.
I agree that server names in this climate of just "anything can be used against you" you should stick to "company, etc,etc,etc"
back in the early WWW it was a free for all. I loved it. now everything is just shit.
My current job, my manager names all the workstations and servers after minerals, with precious/rare minerals for the servers. I thought it would get confusing, but after awhile I got used to it.
When trying to have a conversation its must easier to say ZIRCON is down, instead of WS-OPS-002
Which was why I went with FFIV character names. It was easier to say "palom is acting up again" than some allegedly meaningful alphanumeric string.
Exactly! Conincidentally, all my current computers are named for FFIV characters as well (I'm typing on scarmiglione right now) and it makes it much easier to identify them when something goes awry.
My machines are named after corners on classic racetracks. Initially it was just the nordschleife, with 'bergwerk', 'flugplatz', and 'adenauer', but with my new laptop I branched out to use 'mulsanne'.
When I first started at my current company they used muppet names for most servers at the facility I worked at. Things have grown since then, when you have 1,500+ servers to manage picking cool names really doesn't work. Aside from the difficulty in always having to look up what servers do what and just plain running out of ideas, really it comes down to "ain't nobody got time for that". It is kind of sad really, I still remember the day Elmo was retired and the last of the muppet servers was relegated to the recycling pallet, replace by a boring CHI-MAIL-04.
Many of may machines were named after characters or notable keywords off the show Magnum P.I. Mostly innocuous, though eventually I snapped out of it and got boring.
I've been a sys admin for 30 years now. I've seen all sorts of naming conventions. A nation wide (hint, hint) insurance company I worked for, used mythology for their Netware servers. Greek, Roman, you name it. All the gods and heroes.
Security conscious mindset is to never use an identifying name. So no Database001, no FileServer001, no PrintServer001. No Peoplesoft01, or MAIL001.
My preferred convention is Location-Function-Number. Based on your size, that could be site based, city based, state based, etc. And APP, FIL, SQL, UCS, etc. Example: CMH-APP-001, CMH-APP-002. Or use 4-digit numbering if you think you'll end up with 9999 servers in a category.
For user's computers, mostly just use the serial number or service tag or even again something like cmh-lap-001, cmh-des-001.
Are there sysadmins who actually do this? I've been in the game a while, and only ever seen logical hostnames which quickly provide information on what a server is.
You just can't go wrong with something like [domain]-[location]-[function]-[number]. For example, CN-BRIS-DB-01 to represent [Corporate Network]-[Brisbane]-[Database]-[Primary server]. Even in our non-production environment we try to follow the standard as close as possible.
For my home network I use simply identifiers like transcoder, dc (for domain controller), webserver etc.