Ask HN: How do you name your servers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you name your servers?

8 pointsgkop12 comments

In the cloud age, do you still pick memorable host names for your VPSes? Also do you keep favorite host names in service even as the infrastructure beneath them changes?

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Pokémons.

You can group servers by Pokémon type. Servers named Bulbasaur, Chicorita and Bellsprout probably have similar purposes, since they are all leaf Pokémons.

Another example, Charmander and Charizard. They both have the same purpose (since it's the same Pokémon 'species') but Charizard is a better server (because Charizard is Charmander's last evolution).

Each instance we run is usually a live version of a specific image (Amazon AMI or Docker), which are themselves a snapshot of the code at a certain moment. We version with Semver, so our machine-images and the corresponding servers all inherit those names.

So for example:

* You could find a github tag in our repo marking v1.1.1

* You could find a server image called the same (mydomain.com-v1.1.1)

* If we're running that image as a live server, it too would be called mydomain.com-v1.1.1.

* If we're running multiple servers off the same image in parallel, we'd just append an arbitrary UID to the end of the name to uniquely identify each instance.

Hope that all made sense.

I name all my hardware after entities and places in Lovecraft's universe. My dev laptop is called Azathoth, my main server Thalarion. My dev server Rlyeh runs Xen VMs Rlyeh0, Rlyeh1, ...

It keeps the names memorable and interesting, and can provide interesting conversations. Of course, I really don't manage that much hardware, so this naming scheme is viable short-term.

If you ever run out of inspiration, check out this wiki: http://namingschemes.com/.

Name your machines whatever you want and use CNAMEs to address them. It really shouldn't (and generally doesn't) matter what scheme you use. Naming schemes like this are mostly about personal aesthetics. If you think it looks 1337 to encode a lot of information in the hostname you can do that. You can also choose funny names. When you're small it's easy to manage anything and when you grow any unique key to look up in a server database will do.

I name 'mouse-prodction-8' for Docker host on Digital Ocean. 'mouse' is code name for app, 'production' is environment, '8' is auto incremental number. I name '11142943683383068069' for Docker guest, Date-relative UUID generation https://github.com/recurly/druuid I'm old :(

One of my clients likes to name his servers after Biblical characters. I personally prefer dry name like laptop01, laptop02, server01, server02 etc...

Our main virtual servers are all Breaking Bad characters, with the physical server itself being Heisenberg.

We don't have a reason as to why we name them, but the entire team lived Breaking Bad and it was easy to agree on the name.

I always name them after people I know. Never occurred to me that there was a better way to do it.

I liked this naming schema (I believe it came from HN): http://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/

http://xkcd.com/910/

I name them after the coolest character of the book I'm currently reading.

Elements, H, He, C, O, Mg, V, K, Na and so on...

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