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Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the fun of naming hosts before they became all formalized. Recall in the late '90s at a large Medical distributor, how we set the user/client DHCP pool names from a virus database (there are more virus's than stars in the Universe apparently). Was a nice in-house admin chuckle that AFAIK, nobody in upper management ever found out about. Our in-joke was that virus's kill hosts and the thinking was that without users, every server/service ran just 100% fine.

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I know servers are supposed to be "cattle" but I can't get away from the feeling that having at least a part of the name being somewhat sentimental is a nice thing. The default naming scheme for many containers, for example, will combine an adjective and a noun to create a unique name. I myself wrote a pretty silly script once that randomly returned the name of a British or German naval warship. It seems to me that "formalized" naming doesn't have to be exclusive with sentimentality, you can just add it at the end, like:

geotag-srvtype[#]-prod-[pokemon_name_or_whatever]

That way, if your environment is completely fluid, it becomes obvious when a node has re-deployed, and if it's not, you can just re-use the old name when re-deploying instead of generating a new one.

You can of course include hash-looking things in hostnames as well, but I'm a strong believer that hashes are for computers, not for humans to read (most of the time).

You totally should name the container classes after battleships.

Then you can truthfull say you deleted/sunk the Bismark.

Anyway I think there is nothing wrong with naming classes of things after known things - so you are deploying two more Victor class frontend servers or Dreadnaught monitoring services.

The trouble becomes when you care about Dreadnaught-oux3z and treat it as not disposable.

You could name your servers after cuts of beef, beef recipes, and hamburgers, like the WOPR Computer and Big Mac:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRsycWRQrc8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_(supercomputer)

Not everyone buys into the cattle not pets thing. It's mainly a thing related to auto deployment strategies. Which are great for the cloud with its quick auto scaling capabilities. The ideal vision there is that you shouldn't even have the ability to log in to a server. But there are other usecases where a known environment you can poke around in is more useful IMO.

As an example, in cloud environments not much time is spent investigating issues. When something fails the solution is often to just wipe and redeploy. I prefer fully understanding the problem and having the tools to troubleshoot. Especially because in my work the servers still have different roles.

Ah, the fun of naming hosts. I once named hosts using a long list of trees I found in a scholarly publication. The list also gave botanical names, so for a chuckle I placed them in the corresponding TXT records. You could `dig paperbark-maple` to learn it was "Acer griseum". The good old days.

I'm sure there are many vira, but that comparison can't be true.

> Astronomers estimate there are about 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way alone. Outside that, there are millions upon millions of other galaxies

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Hersch...

That is a lot less than then number of viruses and article linked "An estimated 10 nonillion (10 to the 31st power) individual viruses exist on our planet—enough to assign one to every star in the universe 100 million times over."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/factors-a...

So we can easily give one IPv6 address to any star in the observable universe _OR_ one IPv6 address to any virus on our planet, but we can't possibly address via IPv6 every single virus in every possible planet.

Related: https://xkcd.com/865/

We should give all an ipv6 address

Cool: I can make a lot of money selling a vaccine for each one of those.

Seriously though, has anyone considered the big-O complexity of the "vaccine per virus" approach to improving immunity?

I assume its "named" viruses instead of just a number/designation.

Yeah maybe so, but how many of those 100 thousand millions stars have millions upon millions of their own viruses?

Pretty sure there aren’t any viruses that can survive on a star…

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