Choosing a Name for Your Computer

I used to be very into theme names. You know, back in the early '90s when this document was published.

Sit down and let me tell you a story of the moment that really put the nail in the theme-based name coffin for me...

I used to run a System Admin consulting business. One of our clients had a bunch of systems that were named things like "db" prefix for database servers, "web" for web servers, etc...

They hired a new CTO at one point, and his first order of business was to rename all the servers. His naming scheme was: Machines would be named after cities around the world, and the country they were in would represent the function.

So when we got paged at 3am that "Host statista is down", you both had to know that Statista was a Finnish city, and that Finland was the country chosen for database servers. Knowing that it was the primary rather than secondary was just something you had to remember.

"Host kolding is down" might have been something that could wait until the morning, because that is a Danish city, and that's the name used for web servers, and there are 5 of them that are load-balanced.

He was, to my mind, giddy once this naming scheme was in place. It took something like a calendar month to architect and implement this change.