What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013) | Hacker News Reader

What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)

blog.cloudflare.com

42 pointsaragonite55 comments

I started on a new team once and I was integrating some CloudFlare services, I hooked a domain name and I was assigned a nameserver with my lastname and one with my new manager's lastname... nobody ever believed I did not picked those, people still joke about a love story that involves a manager, myself and CloudFlare.

You are not Woz, right?

Somewhere in Cloudflare's DNS system, a random number generator briefly became the office matchmaker

If you want to know more about the cache invalidation in the whole pipeline of DNS requests, take a look at this

https://blog.cloudflare.com/tld-glue-sticks-around-too-long/

I hinted there how the NS chain of lookups works from . to your domain. The point is that we wanted to be able to move name servers around the ip addresss, but that wouldn't work for many domains. So - in some contexts moving IP's rapidly is possible, in some it's not. Fun.

Vatican server names sounded somewhat interesting too: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. They set up their own ISP and cloud hosting since then, but it was a funny gig they did in the past.

"Naming strategies for servers" seems like a big enough niche for there to exist a compendium somewhere already, but I couldn't find a good one.

I always refer to https://namingschemes.com/Main_Page

Could do with having Minecraft Blocks instead of just Minecraft Materials, that's what I use for my home network

Fantastic, I have long used Culture Ship names [0] to name my devices but this is a far easier list to reference than others online

[0] https://namingschemes.com/Culture_Ships

For LAN servers, I used to name my Linux machines after penguins. It seemed apt, made me smile, especially when new people came on board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_penguins

The Windows and Solaris boxes had numbers before i got there. A new guy started moving them to a name that included the os version like 'server-2008' in it. Never really liked that

https://namingschemes.com/Physical_Injuries lol

Good to see I'm probably not the only one who worked with a monstrous single database for all the things named "Yggdrasil", and a job server that was seemingly constantly trying to take it down named "Nidhogg".

The interesting taxonomy may be less about the source of the names and more about what properties they have

A surprising amount of infrastructure design seems to be hiding patterns that humans will otherwise turn into unsupported features

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: naming things and cache invalidation. Cloudflare writes about how it deals with the first one.

3 hard things: you missed counting things.

The classic version...

There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.

The joke only works if it's still two things.

As always https://xkcd.com/910/

I love these kinds of stories.

> One side note on this point: we once had someone write in to support criticizing us based on the fact that our name server convention is hetro-normative. I will simply say that just because you get two name servers doesn't mean they're in any kind of relationship.

I mean, you could add 50 gender-neutral names to try to balance it out...

There are infinite genders though, so it's not really fair to go beyond that.

Just make it a uuid or some other kind of random a-z0-9 string to avoid all this whimsy and nuisance?

What's wrong with whimsy?

It leads to friction and required follow up extra work, as explained in the article.

Where does it say it leads to friction? Other than the little ninja drawings, but they asked for that

These names are for humans to remember and to type-in, not just for computers. And whimsy names are more memorable, which is a good thing. Random strings are for computers, not humans.

Yeah, very comfortable to use in a conversation.

> Yeah if I'm not mistaken the ticketing service is deployed on t56kl-293d1-5gqp7, do you think we should move it to iwi49-oaqq0-492fa?

This is so cringe. I feel like software engineers are just overgrown toddlers stuck in kindergarten: "We named our servers with boy and girls names and hired an artist to draw their personalities as ninjas!!@!111". I mean, whats wrong with a plain old 4 character hash or whatever?

What's wrong with this? They have resources and desire to make their work fun. What happened to wanting to enjoy what you're doing?

Maybe they should spend more time keeping their servers from crashing lol, and less on nameserver-namings

This is an article from 2013

Exactly, they weren't proactive. Wasting their time on useless fanfiction.

Yeah, I'm sure they've spent a significant time of their whole engineering department in the 13 years since the blog post on this!

The only useful thing they provide is DDOS protection and free analytics. For some reason the whole world is brainwashed into thinking we need all of these horrendous cloud providers. Hetzner is thankfully taking up the market. You need a server and that's it + some ddos protection.

If people cared much more about how they spend their own time (and money) and less about how others spend their's world would've been a much better place. But it ain't

Maybe you should spend more time doing your job better and less on HN comments.

The wrong in this, is the extent they went to with this. I mean, name your servers whatever you want, but hiring an artist to draw the servers personalities and then writing a blog post about this? Like common, that's something a child would do about their favorite toy. At some point, people need to grow up.

And I guess the other "wrong with it" is the fact that it just wastes human potential. Build robust software and take pride in this, not it naming your servers bob and lola.

I reject your joyless reality and substitute my own.

I disagree with your definition of what 'growing up' is about. There is something lost in the world where making silly but fun things is frowned upon. And yes, fun is subjective.

I don't share my kids excitement about most things, but I'm genuinely happy they enjoy themselves so much. Being able to use the same notion to all people, not just (your) kids is part of growing up in my books.

Sure, not using a naming scheme and not hiring the artist would have unlocked the potential to make their software soooo much more robust…

It's not the single act, but the compound effect of millions of such acts across the entire industry.

Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man.

of course it is, never claimed it to be universal truth or something

The only way to properly realize human potential is to have no fun when doing your work? Are you really sure you want to live in a world like that?

There are different grades of "fun". You can do silly things at work, name your servers bob and lola, while still serve the functionality and needs of your customers. But hiring an artist to draw the server as ninjas because "they protect our customers"? What kind of value does that bring? And then you write a blog post about it? Seriously?

Knowing when the fun needs to stop is a way to create valuable things in society. I prefer that, compared to living in world where the state of software is so dire because developers are overgrown kids that spend time writing blog posts about how they named their server pikachu because "pikachu is soooooo cute!!!1111"

Have fun on your hill. Or not, if that's what you prefer.

Common names are much easier for people to copy over and check. As opposed to a random jumble of numbers and letters.

Common names also seem retypeable, which is usually a bad idea because it is error prone, especially in certain fonts. Random jumbles make retyping untenable, so copy-paste is used, which can't make the same mistakes, but is still vulnerable to operator error with incomplete copies.

As someone slightly older than average here, one of the perks of maturity for me is not caring much about what others think anymore. Childish or cringe are fine.

But I don’t judge you: being a teenager or a young adult and rejecting such things is a rite of passage that we all go through.

> When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

― C.S. Lewis

> When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

― 1 Corinthians 13:11

> I also went to the stock market today. I did a business.

Vincent Adultman

I'm quite sure C.S. Lewis was referencing that explicitly.

this is why you never get invited on houses party

Agreed, sounds like Cloudflare is adult daycare. I see it as a sign that these companies have more money to waste than they should have in a functioning competitive market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com