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RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

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Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#91

Post by zoomablemind »

rgj wrote: post #76

Best naming scheme I ever saw was at Harbinger in the late nineties. They used the periodic system. The last octet of the IP address corresponded to the atomic number, and you could use the full element name, or the abbreviation. So carbon.harbinger.com was x.x.x.6 and c.harbinger.com was a CNAME to carbon. oxygen or o was .8 etcetera.

> So carbon.harbinger.com was x.x.x.6 and c.harbinger.com was a CNAME to carbon. oxygen or o was .8 etcetera.

No wonder helium was mostly hanging ...

Sorry, could not resist. It is a clever naming scheme. At one site a client used names from The Three Stooges, then they got the 6th server (exhausting the list of the lead characters).

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#92

Post by bobbyi_settv »

thom wrote: post #40
Etheryte wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To date, Dryad Arbor is still one of the coolest cards in MtG, simply because of both the simplicity and the universality of its quote. When it came out, I was very surprised by the idea that a land could also be a creature. These days we have way wonkier mechanics, but that novelty along with the quote has a special place in my heart.

Yeah I’m always really sad it doesn’t make it into the MTGO cube.

An opponent being able to remove one of your lands with small creature removal or any ping effect or -1/-1 counter is scary.

It sees play (I think) in Legacy and Commander where there are a bunch of specific powerful ways to abuse it (e.g., combo off early with Arbor + Gaea's Cradle to generate a bunch of mana), but you're not going to pull that off often in cube, so it would mostly be a basic forest that your opponent can easily remove.

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#93

Post by p_l »

spenczar5 wrote: post #67
p_l wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'll go with seemingly unpopular opinion that there are only pets, never cattle. 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 f…

Ehh, it's actually a topic for a yet-unfinished article of mine, but note that I pointed that "us-east-1 lambda service" is still a pet.

In the case you described, whatever drives the replacement system is the pet - the so-called cattle are just "components" that became interchangeable for the bigger "pet" system. As another commented called it, you need good names at the edge - where the edge for me is the level where you care about the system. We used to care about individual components of a computer and those would be effectively "pets" of the time. Nowadays, you do not give name to a DIMM in your server nor take extra care to ensure it works. And so on, till you reach the level you actually have to care, and that's where you need to name it (IMO) because that's your pet, even if it's composed of what people call cattle.

As for hostnames matching functions - I found much more use when making hostnames reflect basic type of hw and physical location, and would keep the name as long as the location didn't change. The rest depended on what functions were currently applied to the machine.

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#94

Post by p_l »

geofft wrote: post #49
p_l wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why can't you rename the host if its function changes? Like if "the 1U box with asset tag XY1Z234" goes from being a web server to a DB server, why not reinstall it and call it db03? I think the approach of naming the host "freddy" works for small installations (and all installations in 1990 were small), where reinstalling a single server is a manual process and impacts your capacity, and where humans remember "Oh, f…

Maybe it depends on how big pockets one used to have, and how willing one was to follow vendors jealously declaring their software should be the only thing running on the server.

In my experience, unless a server was a VM host (or, these days, k8s cluster), it was rare that it would be single function. We just didn't have the money to allow such waste of resources. So unless you had single-software with enough requirements to hog the whole box (usually DB servers), then everything tended to have multiple functions, and reimaging was rarer event.

So I prefer to have "Freddy the web serving system", which might contain several machines named in style of R04-24.SFO.i.contoso.com ;) - because "freddy the web serving system" is the part that I care, and individual components enter everyday care only in the metrics of capacity planning dashboard.

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#96

Post by mcguire »

Back when I was a sysadmin at a university CS department, we always picked namespaces for machines---everything in a given namespace had related names and were identical (or nearly identical) machines. If someone mentioned toque or glenfiddich, you could tell what lab they were in and what kind of machine they were.

I always wanted to use 'Starships from Iain M. Banks' science fiction', which is why no one ever listened to me.

For personal machines, I have been using adjectives that start with 'i'.

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#97

Post by throwaway525142 »

majewsky wrote: post #52
cy6erlion wrote: post #15

Shameless 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.

That unfortunately has an installed size of 500MiB.

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#99

Post by malobre »

rgj wrote: post #76

Best naming scheme I ever saw was at Harbinger in the late nineties. They used the periodic system. The last octet of the IP address corresponded to the atomic number, and you could use the full element name, or the abbreviation. So carbon.harbinger.com was x.x.x.6 and c.harbinger.com was a CNAME to carbon. oxygen or o was .8 etcetera.

It's funny it is exactly what I did on my LAN, Hydrogen being my router and so on.
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