Choosing a name for your computer | Hacker News Reader

Choosing a name for your computer

tools.ietf.org

19 pointsScotterC10 comments

What do you do when you have 200+ machines of a handful of different types (database, mail, web, etc.) that you want to have named? Having some sort of organized categorization would be beneficial, but it seems like naming them after 200+ different colors doesn't make life any easier.

Naming after the purpose of the box also gets messy if you're not strict about renaming when the machine is repurposed. And if you group by "theme groups" as the RFC suggests, you're still stuck renaming a machine if it's no longer one of your 7 dwarfs (database servers, or whatever). Should the name convey meaning at all, or just be a random label?

A developer I know doesn't see the problem with just having the full location (state, data center, rack, rack location), which I'm against, but we haven't been able to agree on a good middle ground approach that scales. Is location data in a name universally bad?

The paper mentions that a numeric suffix scheme works fine if "you have a lot of machines and there are no reasons for any human to distinguish between them". I’d say modern production setup with a ton of configuration managed machines that no one logs into should be named this way.

This is more advice for "snowflake servers" and workstations.

As for geographic location I had (viewed) a bad experience college when a server in the main server room started DOSing another box in the same room. The culprit was ruled out for a very long while 'cause it’s name claimed that it was all the way across campus - so it couldn’t be the problem. Because of this I’m with the paper on the no geography in names point. Geography in names causes thinking errors in people.

The epilogue mentioned that the original paper included a Gary Larson cartoon. That got me curious so I hunted down the original paper. It was worth it ;-)

http://www.mel.nist.gov/msidlibrary/doc/libes89.pdf

For something published in 1990 it holds up remarkably well. It is however almost entirely conventional wisdom at this point. Which does raise the question of weather the points made became conventional wisdom because of this papers publication.

Wonderful essay, thanks for posting it.

For servers, I have seen numbered-names work quite well in most of the projects that I've worked on -- www01, www02, app01, app02, db01, mq01, mq02, so on and so forth.

Workstations my university were named by location -- swlab01 or even by the hall numbers, 496-01, 496-02.

Unfortunately, I've never come across more creative themes of hostnames like colors, or planets in Star Wars or football players etc. But I will definitely re-read this RFC next time I get to setup a lab or a series of servers from scratch.

> Workstations my university were named by location -- swlab01 or even by the hall numbers, 496-01, 496-02

They were never moved? Or did they have to be renamed then?

Fauna/Flora will give you a large set of names to use e.g: reptiles yields 9k species alone [1]. A theme is best if it is a large enough superset to be inexhaustible for your naming needs (ie, 9 planets = bad choice if you expect more than say, 3 or 4 machines). Good examples: mythical pantheons, sports lingo, mixed drink names, etc.

[1] http://www.reptile-database.org/db-info/SpeciesStat.html

You can make subtle political comments. Long ago I was very comfortable with my assigned workstation, so I named it "bag-end".

Then owing to a stupid management decision all in my group were required to move to machines of an unfamiliar and inferior sort. I named this one "crickhollow".

I don't think anyone in management got the reference but I felt better.

I've long been a fan of collective nouns, you could almost never run out even if you choose only birds .. Murder anyone?

There's a great cluster at CMU that had all Phish songs as names

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