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Hostnames

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181–187 of 187 posts

Re: Hostnames

#181
post #143

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 saw this post and came to write a comment about "save yourself some trouble, make it random or positional and just have a functional inventory system which you'll need anyway" but hey, look, it's gmjosack beating me to it! ;)

Party on HN! Sorry I'm late. :)

Re: Hostnames

#183

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.

The old UK dial-up service Freeserve used to use these too.

Re: Hostnames

#184

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.

My old department at the UvA did the same in the past, new sysadmin changed it to European capitol cities. (I'll never lose muscle memory for typing sandshrew and farfetch.) Come to think of it, the DNS server should've been called PokeDex...

(btw, the mail infra consisted only of carebears... I'm looking at YOU J.P.!)

Re: Hostnames

#185
An admin in a research lab where I was an intern had used negative emotions as a naming scheme. Anger Despair Fear etc. until someone on his day off created a machine called 'lol'. I think I noticed all the previous hostnames in his face when he found out about that one...

Re: Hostnames

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my favorite one. For extra awesome, you can use the atomic mass of each element as the last octet of the device's IP address.

Nice - but don't you mean Atomic Number, not Atomic Mass? The atomic numbers (i.e. the count of protons in the nucleus) are the nice non-overlapping integers 1-118, whereas the masses are all over the shop, and has overlap with isotopes of other elements.

Yep, you're right.

Re: Hostnames

#187
--XYnn..company.com

foo-prod-1101.sea1.company.com foo-dev-1201.sea2.company.com foo-test-2101.ord1.company.com

'foo' is whatever, and 'mysql' is bad while 'corp-db' is better as other commentators mentioned.

for XYnn match X to the airport code of the datacenter, match Y to the sequence number of the datacenter, and 'nn' is a 2-digit code for the number in the cluster.

all short names are unique this way. all datacenter can have a mix of prod/int/dev/test. you can use DNS name resolution search path to lookup services like 'ldap' in your local datacenter.

don't use serial numbers. foo-123456789 is annoying for humans to use and will get truncated with interesting results. i had a discussion one time on chat with another engineer where i was looking at box '123' and he was looking at box '789' and we were both getting real confused because it seemed like we were on the same box... because we were...

also only use "company.com" as your domain for every server and desktop in your company. if you need "company.co.uk" then it should only host websites "www.company.co.uk" that points at VIPs and the servers behind that should all still live in company.com. if you have windows boxes then setup a domain for AD "ad.company.com" or "win.company.com" and let your domain servers own that and setup proper DNS delegation from the parent.

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