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Hostnames

seriss.com

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151–160 of 187 posts

Re: Hostnames

#151

Post by foohbarbaz »

The morons in IT department in my current company have accomplished an amazing feat with the host names. We have one host name that I have been using for 2 years almost every day and I still have not memorized it! I am having to cut and paste it every single time.

The host names were invented so people won't have to memorize IP addresses. IT morons here with their "functional hostnames" have managed to defeat the purpose of hostnames, so that they are now harder to remember than IP addresses!

Please please please get a clue, use geography, mythology, Simpsons, anything but stupid "bisappjmpthatthislakdh000283".

Re: Hostnames

#152

Post by matiasb »

kordless wrote: post #70

My ISP in the 90s had fruits for hostnames. The main Cisco router was called 'passion'. Shortly after setting it up, I pinged it from a Solaris box. The response was 'passion is alive'. I tell this story every time there is a 'what do you call your hosts?' discussion!

At my CCNA class the teacher used local politicans names for routers/switches, I remember it was election period and routing classes usually ended up with discussions about politics.

Re: Hostnames

#154

Post by nephorider »

I used to go with "theme" name like wine oriented (chardonnay, merlot...) But after a while it gets confusing to remember which machine does what and switch to more "functional" names like "worker01, worker02, db01..."

Re: Hostnames

#155

Post by lmm »

philwelch wrote: post #107
blibble wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy this logic. Renaming machines is a pain, and they inevitably end up with more/different stuff on them than was originally intended, then your "helpful" name like pukweb01 (production, uk, web, 01) is worse than "pikachu" (as it's incorrect). the correct way to do this is to give the machine a name with no meaning (maybe pikachu, maybe box005) and have a list of the services running on each machine, and us…

If you're repurposing the machine anyway you might as well totally wipe and reprovision it, right?

Even if both are automated, a full OS reinstall is slower than just installing a new service.

Re: Hostnames

#156

Post by lmm »

gmjosack wrote: post #79

After working in a few pretty large environments I have some pretty strong opinions about hostnames. I've seen everything from cute theme based names to function/role based names to meaningless uuid based names. Usually you see the theme based names in much smaller environments, though I've seen it up to hundreds of machines. One problem I have with this approach is that people begin to personify machines, excusing t…

> One problem I have with this approach is that people begin to personify machines, excusing their behavior.

Does that hold with all themes? My first employer named computers after aircraft parts; easy to remember, made it clear that people were talking about a computer rather than anything else, but it never seemed to lead us to personify them.

> I'd argue that you shouldn't care about specific machines unless they're a problem

True once you've scaled up to the point that all your services are distributed, but before then it's worth having an awareness of what runs on what box. Memorable names help with that.

One other downside you've missed with location-based is that it makes it harder to move a machine.

Re: Hostnames

#157

Post by gopher »

gmjosack wrote: post #79

After working in a few pretty large environments I have some pretty strong opinions about hostnames. I've seen everything from cute theme based names to function/role based names to meaningless uuid based names. Usually you see the theme based names in much smaller environments, though I've seen it up to hundreds of machines. One problem I have with this approach is that people begin to personify machines, excusing t…

I think it depends mainly on the stakeholders. If we're talking about physical machines, I suggest location/hardware based naming. For virtual machines, I'd choose function/role based naming. Though, this depends on type and size of engineering staff that needs to work with it. For end users, I'd add service based names, possibly as cnames. And I'd plan to change the naming scheme as the requirements change. Has anyone a naming scheme that lasted more than ten years?

Re: Hostnames

#158

Post by [deleted] »

gmjosack wrote: post #79

After working in a few pretty large environments I have some pretty strong opinions about hostnames. I've seen everything from cute theme based names to function/role based names to meaningless uuid based names. Usually you see the theme based names in much smaller environments, though I've seen it up to hundreds of machines. One problem I have with this approach is that people begin to personify machines, excusing t…

[deleted]

Re: Hostnames

#159

Post by mevodig »

An interesting tidbit; the list is compiled by Greg Ercolano, author of the render queue software Rush[1], for which he received an Academy Award in 2011[2].

It's a great piece of software for the VFX/post-production industry, and he's by far the best software vendor I've ever worked with.

[1] http://seriss.com/rush/

[2] http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2011/20110107.html

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