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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)

#101

Post by vermilingua »

mcguire wrote: post #96

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 liste…

I’ve been using Culture ship names for my personal machines for nearly as long as I’ve been naming machines.

Wikipedia’s decision to delete the list was utterly ridiculous, thankfully they all made it over to the fandom wiki.

Unfortunately they’re now a finite resource, RIP.

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

#102

Post by anarcat »

p_l wrote: post #17
mrweasel wrote: post #10

This 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…

I used to name physical servers like pets (greek gods or whatever) and virtuals like cattle (function), with the idea that, yes, function of physical machines can change over time...

But the problem with that logic is that the name is not only attached to the metal, it's set (and mostly so, I'd argue) in software, as the OS hostname. And then what happens next is that the motherboard of that precious pet melts down and you scramble to move those drives to a spare, and now you have two metals with the same name.

It just doesn't work so well.

And your fancy random or pseudorandom looking naming scheme is cool and fun until someone new comes in and asks you wtf colchicifolium is...

Name machines on purpose. If the purpose changes, the OS will likely follow as well. If not, renaming shouldn't be that big of a deal, or, to put it another way: if you can't rename, you can't reinstall, and then you'll fail.

Now naming hardware is the "fun" part. when is the last time you did an inventory of your motherboards? or is it disks we're naming? the raid array or individual ones? how about memory sticks? or do you only name precious server cases? ;) after all, that is where the label ends up...

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

#103

Post by anarcat »

curtis3389 wrote: post #22

I 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. | | |…

I really like the functional naming part of this, but I don't like the idea of using random names.. I think that server names must be functional otherwise you will tend to think of them as an abstract box that, if you just install that little extra package, will be a fine webserver on top of that mailer.

Don't do it! If you're labeling hardware and need multiple functions, use virtualisation or containers, and then the host is named after that (e.g. we use Ganeti, so gnt-01, or say kube-01).

At home, I name machines after inspiring political figures and while I like the naming, it does discourage me into treating those machines as cattle, which I should do more.

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

#105

Post by anarcat »

anarcat wrote: post #103
curtis3389 wrote: post #22

I 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. | | |…

I really like the functional naming part of this, but I don't like the idea of using random names.. I think that server names must be functional otherwise you will tend to think of them as an abstract box that, if you just install that little extra package, will be a fine webserver on top of that mailer. Don't do it! If you're labeling hardware and need multiple functions, use virtualisation or containers, and then t…

oh and forgot to mention.. at my current job, there was this practice of naming servers after onions (I'll let you guess where that is).

I had no idea how many kinds of onions there were turns out there are many, especially if you start to take in Latin names and translations...

But then I need to learn how to spell colchicifolium, and neriniflorum, and no, those two are not related (or are they) and what does meronense do again? and oh yeah corsicum is the replica of one of those...

Those naming conventions are cool until you start to document your stuff properly and start being serious about training and including new people. Then you should focus on meaningful, easy to remember, type, and generate, names.

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

#106

Post by sellyme »

Sometimes when reading documents from the infancy of the internet it's difficult to get a sense for the online environment at the time it was written.

For this one that difficulty disappeared very quickly once I got to the section where the existence of a computer in Tahiti was indeterminate.

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

#107

Post by jlgaddis »

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.

What was the plan if they needed another subnet?

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

#109

Post by genewitch »

cortesoft wrote: post #66
acomjean wrote: post #20

Like 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…

On the other hand, I really hate code names for software versions... I can never remember which name is which version. I wish everyone would just say “16.04” and “18.04”, that makes it really obvious which version cam before the other one.

I never bothered to figure out if Ubuntu kept parts of the name between the 16.04 and the 16.10 version, or if they just used the next letter in the alphabet.

The iso images are numbered (ubuntu-server-16.04.02-x64.iso or whatever) thankfully, so i have 4 ubuntu templates - "leaving LTS this year", the next two LTS, and whatever the 9 month version is currently (20.10 being the current 9 month version)

Thankfully qemu/docker/lxc have made "freezing" a stable, working machine at 16.04 (or even 14.04 if you had the foresight to set it up on qemu at least) - but now i have tons of naming issues. We use a pooled hypervisor system, so sometimes i name things after which pool "server" they are on because i will spin two vms on different servers in the pool with the same VM name (say asterisk-voip) but when you log in it will say asterisk-pve2 or asterisk-wok3 as a quick "hint" as to when i actually "finished" installing it.

for DNS i only name stuff when an "app" requires it either for TLS/SSL or whatever reason. I don't maintain a real DNS server anywhere, and i really should, but i don't like naming things for literally all of the reasons hashed over by everyone in this thread!

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

#110

Post by curtis3389 »

anarcat wrote: post #103
curtis3389 wrote: post #22

I 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. | | |…

I really like the functional naming part of this, but I don't like the idea of using random names.. I think that server names must be functional otherwise you will tend to think of them as an abstract box that, if you just install that little extra package, will be a fine webserver on top of that mailer. Don't do it! If you're labeling hardware and need multiple functions, use virtualisation or containers, and then t…

I prefer to have mostly meaningless names for machines, and then having more names for them in DNS for their various functions. That way the functions can be moved about the machines and if that's what you care about, then that's how you refer to them (deploy the app Foobar to web01 and web02), but when a machine goes down, you can shout, "clark is down!" web01/dns01/sto01 being down only means the service is down, whereas clark being down is something more severe.

I manage my stuff with Ansible, which makes all this pretty easy.

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