RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
61–70 of 128 posts
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use food. Abstract, but also memorable.
Personally — since we're all chiming in — I use elements. My fallback DNS is a periodic table.
This might be the coolest thing I've read all year...
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#63I 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)
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#65I 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 '/^$/d' | shuf -n 1 i.e. | | |…
sed "$((RANDOM % 1632 + 1))q;d" words.txt
Grab this cleaned wordlist with 1 word per line: wget http://nerab.github.io/wordlist/words.txtRe: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#66Like a lot of things, people can remember names of things better than numbers. Genes for example, it’s easier to remember their names lz, wnt, than their associated gene Id number. But like stars and many other things there are too many to give each a unique name. Naming can make sense, our old cluster was named after orchestra parts. When you logged In you where placed on the lobby. The machines where clustered (vio…
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#67This 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…
Functional names for servers are IMHO one of the worst possible options, because functions drift over time. Have individual hw named in unique way that isn't related to functionality it runs, then use CNAMEs specific to functionality - i.e. never point a DNS client at "freddy.dc.somecorp.com", you point it at "dns01.dc.somecorp.com". The decision on what machines need unique names, not just pseudorandom IDs or simila…
This is emphatically not true beyond a certain point, perhaps around 500 boxes or so. My last job involved working on a fleet of about 15,000 hosts; I can promise that extremely few of the servers were precious pets. They really were cattle, and we would blow away and reimage them into different functions (with hostnames matching the function) moderately frequently.
Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#68Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
#69Unfortunately, I only remember the test and production server names. The test systems were "Trinidad" and "Tobago". The production systems where "Nevis" and "Nassau" (the app started with an 'N').
The thing that made this work really well was that the first syllable hinted on what the rest of the word would be and then everything beyond that reinforced that you read it right. This even was the case that foreign accents, while slightly off still reinforced the "you heard this right".
The machines _also_ had names of "test01" and "test02" or similar... but we (as devs) never used those names because you had to listen to the end of it to be sure that you had the right machines.