Hostnames • Hacker News Board

Re: Hostnames

#21

Post by pallandt » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 8:59 PM UTC

spindritf wrote: post #3

There's an RFC on that, too. "Choosing a name for your computer" http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178 Shades of colours, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_blue , are a good, safe source of names.

Commenting so I can have a later reference to this post. Thanks!

Re: Hostnames

#22

Post by xenophonf » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:01 PM UTC

If I may put forth a slice of my personal philosophy, it's that silly host names have ruled naming conventions long enough. I much prefer boring but logical descriptors that help my network self-document: whether simple codes useful in small environments (like "file01") or more complex schemes suitable for large-scale computing (e.g., "masip150ntvirt" or "cin-me-exch-01"). With the right scheme, 15 characters can tell you a lot about the location, ownership, configuration, and purpose of a particular computer. The cutesy naming conventions do nothing to help admins do their jobs or - in my opinion - actively get in the way.

Re: Hostnames

#23

Post by perlgeek » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:01 PM UTC

Or simply have a naming convention for hosts. I realize that only makes sense for sufficiently large setups, but once your setup is large enough, it does make things easier.

At $work we maintain setups for customers, and our FQDNs are roughly ...tld. So the second database server in the testing environment for customer "nasa" (hypothetical, of course) would be called db02t.nasa...

It does make it pretty obvious from the FQDN what the used is being used for.

Re: Hostnames

#24

Post by nostromo » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:01 PM UTC

We use Pokemon.

There's something super memorable about Blastoise, Slowbro, Squirtle, Ninetales, Jigglypuff...

I also color my tabs the color of the Pokemon for fast reference.

Re: Hostnames

#25

Post by Brajeshwar » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:02 PM UTC

Lord of the Rings?

Re: Hostnames

#26

Post by lost-theory » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:02 PM UTC

Cute server naming schemes are one of my pet peeves. In my experience the only two logical choices are: sequential numbers (e.g. foo1, ..., foo100, ... if your company name is Foo Corp.), or hashes / uuids (like amazon instance IDs, e.g. i-977a24e3). If you want to give a server a memorable or cute name, use DNS or some kind of alias.

Re: Hostnames

#27

Post by lightstalker » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:02 PM UTC

My old university used birds (Round Robin access via the "aviary"), noble gasses, music genres.

Myself, I use types of alcohol.

Re: Hostnames

#28

Post by tillk » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:04 PM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #23

Or simply have a naming convention for hosts. I realize that only makes sense for sufficiently large setups, but once your setup is large enough, it does make things easier. At $work we maintain setups for customers, and our FQDNs are roughly . . .tld. So the second database server in the testing environment for customer "nasa" (hypothetical, of course) would be called db02t.nasa. . . It does make it pretty obvious f…

I agree with this. Call servers after their purpose. I don't grow attached to servers anymore — especially in the cloud.

Re: Hostnames

#29

Post by yamaneko » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

binarymax wrote: post #16

Sweet list. Phonetic Alphabet is a good one - it has the typing superpower of striking first letter then for instant autocomplete.

Good idea!

Re: Hostnames

#30

Post by peckrob » Sat, Oct 12, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

We used to use Marvel characters until our setup got too big. Now it's (datacenter)-(type (web, proxy, db, etc))(number). So, sfo-proxy1, for example.