Live data from Hacker News

Hostnames

seriss.com

111–120 of 187 posts

Re: Hostnames

#111

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?

Definitely. But why add the overhead over updating DNS/DHCP?

Re: Hostnames

#112
A well-known compute cluster at Berkeley created hostnames after types of disasters:

  -tsunami
  -apocalypse
  -famine
  -avalanche
  -hailstorm
  -lightning
  -heatwave
  -locusts
  -tornado
  -fallingrocks (
Interestingly, though run on a shoestring, this proved to be one of the most reliable set of servers on campus. I guess the disaster naming was a sort of a reverse jinx.

Re: Hostnames

#113
At ITECS, our Systems division uses practical names like engr-ras-201 for servers. However, we have a bit more fun with workstations. My machine was named "waytso." I asked my boss what it stood for once, and she said that after the machine that used to sit on that desk had died, Desktop Support sat down an old Dell Dimension to hold us over until they could get a newer machine ready.

It ended up taking a few months, and one day, they called her and said, "Hey, we're ready to image the new Webteam workstation. What should we set the hostname to?" "Waytso." "Waytso? What does that mean?" "Why Are You Taking SO long!?"

Re: Hostnames

#116
To add a little counterweight to the 'should you give cute names' discussion - there is at least one reason why cute names are a good idea. I work for a web host, and our servers are named after musicians. It's a lot more likely on the phone that if I ask a customer which box they're on, they'll remember Hendrix or Prince or Buckethead over web-london-534.

Re: Hostnames

#117
post #28

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.

It looks like there's two types of answers in this thread, and the difference between them is whether their infrastructure is cloud-based or running in a datacenter:

- Cloud: "Who cares? Name them after pokemon or dinosaurs, you can always reprovision and they won't last very long."

- Datacenter: "But what if the name doesn't make sense 16 months from now??"

Re: Hostnames

#118
I like using weird names but having them also be unique by first character.

Re: Hostnames

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is freaking brilliant. I grew up with that game and never even considered using them for hostnames.

I always had the idea, but never enough machines to name.

uptil I looked at the receipt which had said $9272, I didn't believe that my mom in-law woz realie bringing in money in there spare time on there computar.. there friends cousin haz done this 4 only about eighteen months and recently cleard the mortgage on their place and bourt a great opel. additional info ==========================

http://WWW.WORKS23.COM

Re: Hostnames

#120

Planets mentioned in Star Wars is a good source (if you include books) although some can be hard to spell.

In Ancient Times, Industrial Light and Magic was on Usenet, and maybe the Internet, via a system named dagobah.

I worked in a computer graphics group that used artist names, like vermeer, escher, davinci, etc. My system was bonestell. In another group I was in, we used names of dances, like bolero, foxtrot, tango, etc. The guy who suggested bolero was thinking of Bo Derek, but I took the idea of dance names and ran with it. My system was tarantella, which was hard enough to spell that people stayed off of it.

At home, I don't follow a pattern, but I have used names from "A Wrinkle in Time". My first quad core linux system was called tesseract and my Windows box was camazotz. I've always like the names of the earliest computers like ENIAC, EDSAC, UNIVAC, etc., so I named my Mac Pro prozac. I've considered naming my two raspberry pis colossus and guardian...

Post reply on HN