I am fondly recollecting my time as an undergraduate at CMU in the 80s. All the machines were named from cities and towns in Pennsylvania. Old-school bare-metal on-prem indeed. That time has largely passed as machines are ephemeral. Functional names make more sense now.
RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
51–60 of 128 posts
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#52Shameless plug, CLI for reading IETF RFCs. https://github.com/cy6erlion/ietf You will read this RFC like this: $ ietf -n 1178
Alternative method for Arch Linux: Install the `rfc` package, then find the RFC at /usr/share/doc/rfc/txt/rfc1178.txt. A very nice package to have installed when travelling far from an internet connection.
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#53> Certain sets are finite, such as the seven dwarfs. When you order your first seven computers, keep in mind that you will probably get more next year. We ran into this years ago when we named our machines after the Marx Brothers. We started out with Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo. When two more arrived, we used Chico and Gummo. IIRC we added Karl, Deutsche, Skid, Birth and Spencer before giving in and adopting a proper 'c…
> a proper 'cattle not pets' convention (which, by the way, isn't covered by TFA). It is: ... Of course, they could have called the second one "shop2" and so on. But then one is really only distinguishing machines by their number. You might as well just call them "1", "2", and "3". The only time this kind of naming scheme is appropriate is when you have a lot of machines and there are no reasons for any human to dist…
Remember that this was written in 1990. Kubernetes wasn't around back then.
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#54This kind of naming is fine for small projects, and personal setups. In professional settings I would suggest using descriptive names and rely more on DNS. It's not that I don't enjoy fun and personal naming schemes, it's just that it's a constant annoyance when dealing with a large number of different systems. We've been hired to deal with different companies, who picks some random naming, cars, athletes, plants, ci…
"prod-web02" implies that this is the second web server in a cluster of web servers. That makes a lot of sense in 2021, where "prod-web02" is likely an AWS instance or a docker VM that is doing nothing but serving web pages, and which exists in some cloud server where you will never see the physical machine it is running on. This was written in 1990, though, and there was no cloud, and VMs were quite rare things, (an…
"or running LANe for small nations."
I had the joy of working on several ATM to the desktop campus networks using LANE and an ATM WAN using LANE to connect several thousand locations for an organization belonging to a large nation state. Thanks for triggering some horrible memories. ;)
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#55I use Harry Potter character names. There were hundreds of the mentioned off hand in the books, so I usually use obscure ones. They have the benefit of being easy to pronounce and spell: Mafalda Hopkirk, Silvanus Kettleburn, Irma Pince, etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_charact...
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#56This kind of naming is fine for small projects, and personal setups. In professional settings I would suggest using descriptive names and rely more on DNS. It's not that I don't enjoy fun and personal naming schemes, it's just that it's a constant annoyance when dealing with a large number of different systems. We've been hired to deal with different companies, who picks some random naming, cars, athletes, plants, ci…
Cute naming schemes are a holdover from the days of physical servers when location, function, etc were subject to change so an immutable machine name couldn't contain them. Now that most things are virtual and easily created/destroyed there's no good reason _not_ to name functionally. The most common refrain I've heard in defense of these archaic naming practices is that "we don't want the hackers to know which server does what" but if they've managed to get your root DNS zone file or a shell on a box then you're already pretty far gone anyway (not to mention that nmap exists). All it does is impede productivity and create the illusion of security.
If you are dealing with assets in a physical environment then obviously the above doesn't apply.
As a side note: a long time ago (before I knew what I was doing) I ran a Windows Server environment for my dad's business. The main server was Jake and the off-site backup was Elwood.
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#57what's tomorrow, a thread on last night's dreams? No one cares how you name your computers.
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#58At the risk of showing my age...
In my own private home lab -- which has grown way too large -- I like using names of the Garbage Pail Kids [0] as hostnames.
There's a few benefits to this naming scheme, when dealing with physical machines at least: 1) you can usually find a name that suits the "temperament" of the particular host and 2) you can tape the trading card to the host (or the rack, next to it) to make finding / identifying it easier.
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Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
"prod-web02" implies that this is the second web server in a cluster of web servers. That makes a lot of sense in 2021, where "prod-web02" is likely an AWS instance or a docker VM that is doing nothing but serving web pages, and which exists in some cloud server where you will never see the physical machine it is running on. This was written in 1990, though, and there was no cloud, and VMs were quite rare things, (an…
"or running LANe for small nations." I had the joy of working on several ATM to the desktop campus networks using LANE and an ATM WAN using LANE to connect several thousand locations for an organization belonging to a large nation state. Thanks for triggering some horrible memories. ;)
I spent an entire weekend, dialed in by modem from Canada to a certain oil exporting middle eastern country, trying to figure out why the control plane for the ATM WAN that ran LANE for all their hospitals and 911 services was down. Fun times. :P
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#60I use the wordlist from Oren Tirosh’s mnemonic encoding project: http://web.archive.org/web/20090918202746/http://tothink.com... I can't find the post that linked it, but it had a very nice scheme. EDIT: found it: https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/ EDIT2: one-liner to get a random word from the file: cat wordlist.txt | tail -n +2 | sed -E 's/\s*(\w+)\s+/\1\n/g' | sed -E '/^$/d' | shuf -n 1 i.e. | | |…
Once I was moved to a new team at work, and the team leader really wanted a team name. I generated like 5 or 10 words from /usr/share/dict/words, one of which was profanity. I could tell that everyone liked Team Profanity, but no one was brave enough to adopt it. I really wish we had, because there was much cursing on that team.
Minor correction: path is /usr/share/dict/words