I stepped away from naming hosts the year I learned to use Puppet. After being able to create an infrastructure based on code, the idea of naming hosts just seemed pointless.
Hostnames
81–90 of 187 posts
Re: Hostnames
#82We 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.
This comment is interesting (as well as the other 2 children saying they also use Pokemon for host names), as there has been a study about how kids had fantastic abilities at recognizing Pokemon, but could not achieve the same levels of memorization with flora and fauna:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11924673
This inspired a researcher to create a card game similar to Pokemon, but for our biosphere: http://phylogame.org/
Re: Hostnames
#83We 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.
RPI does this with many of their dynamic hostnames, search Pikachu to find that section.
ftp://ftp.rpi.edu/etc/hosts
Re: Hostnames
#84There'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.
Any Category: page on Wikipedia is great. I've been using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_foresters for a while now.
Re: Hostnames
#85This is ridiculously unnecessary, and very confusing for new team members and devops. Hostnames should be descriptive and help describe the machine's location and responsibility in the network topology. Like webserver01a (nginx, first machine in LB, us-east1a). Sure it's not cutesy as "pikachu" or "bobasaur", but it will sure make your nagios/copperegg dashboard make lot more sense. And when shit hits the fan you won…
I (somewhat) disagree. Every machine should have a unique hostname that has nothing to do with its function. It should be in DNS and should be the name you use to remotely manage it. Descriptive names should also be assigned in DNS as functions are assigned to the device (either as additional A/AAAA records or CNAMEs). This is flexible and scales well.
Many years ago, I originally assigned descriptive names to machines as I deployed them, but this didn't scale well as we wanted to move services (and their related hostames) to other machines. So I started assigning unique names to machines, using famous figures born on the day of configuration (as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_12#Births). That was 'cute' for a while, but now I just generate random 4-letter words and pick the ones I like. The namespace is large enough for my purposes, the names are short enough for easy typing (ssh fang), and everything aligns nicely in text (zone files, inventory, etc.). In some cases, I've even replaced descriptive names with TXT records in DNS associated with the unique name.
Re: Hostnames
#86I use locations from the Zelda universe.
my current machines are
lakehylia, lostwoods, termina, koholint, skyloft, deathmountain, minishwoods
Re: Hostnames
#87scientists make good hostnames, e.g. Sagan, Feynman, Darwin, etc...
Re: Hostnames
#88Amazing!
At my company: For machines where usually you should NOT log in we use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distilleries_in_Scotlan...
That is because they are so hard to spell! You really need to put the effort into it (e.g. Bruichladdich)
For the ones you should be logging into we use the most popular out of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Home_appliance_brands
Which also fits in well with what the machines do... number crunching!
Re: Hostnames
#89After many, many nights spent tracking down servers named after:
Indian food dishes (30 of em! "where is jalfrazie?") Great US mountains (ugh.) 'win2003' the Sun box (ugh again. don't name the box after the OS running on it...)
...i'd say my favorite was 'appname-colo-number#-rackunit#-rack#.airportcode.yourdomain'. This way, the db server in your new york colo JFK1 is easily found in rack unit 20 of rack #5 (db01-20-5.jfk1.example.com).
Once you have +200 servers, having physical location and role mapped to the hostname is a game changer. Even better would be having just a six digit hex hash that you could look up in a noc dashboard.
Note that all that other cutesy stuff is fine as a CNAME, but the FQDN might as well be made significant since it needs to be unique anyway.
Re: Hostnames
#90I use elements. Machine with IP 192.168.1.x gets the element with atomic number x as it's hostname. :) http://computernamer.com is good too. Routers are named after species of penguin!
You can set up CNAMEs for their atomic symbols, too, to save typing.