What names to you give your servers?

[harry d brown jr]

I found out Thursday that "operations", and I use that term very lightly, has developed a naming convention that eludes imagination.

For our branches we used an number scheme that works rather well. Our development machines for "field" (branches) are named "fad#" (Field Application Development - where # is a number). Our corporate development machines are "cad#"'s (Corporate Application Development). Our field test machines are "flt#"'s (Field Like Test). Our corporate production names usually are named after the name of the division, which is usually a three character acronym. Simple and sweet.

But with the new convention a simple name will be distorted into some hodge podge of meaningless letters and numbers. Maybe we should name them after their location in the computer:

row10col55 ??

Of course the names will be longer than eight characters and I asked so what do we expect to break? Answer: who knows.

Oh well, at least my lab machines will continue to be named what the hell I want to name them!

live free or die
harry

[Deepak Extross]

We use cartoon characters - Asterix, Garfield, Archie, Tintin, Calvin... These days the SysAdmins name the new machines on similar lines, but back in the old days we actually used to vote on this.

[Ceesjan van Hattum]

Hi,

Very simple: do not try to be smart in namingconventions:
no numbers
no business(unit)names
no OSversion
no dates

My experience proves that all ideas seem to be good in the beginning, but will fail later.
Especially logicalnames will do good (for example in monitoring-scripts) but one exeption will destroy all logic.

Simly start with a group of:
composers: mozart, vivaldi, back, beethoven, verdi..
solarsystem: orion, uranus, ..

If you're out of names, find extentions like: piano, violin (for the composergroup) and horizon, vulcano to the solargroup.

Using pronouncable names makes talking easier and will prevent sysadmins from using hardcoded scripts.

Regards,
Ceesjan

[Duncan Edmonstone]

I once visited a site where the original BOFH must have worked... there were servers called 'up' and 'down', and a cluster (not HP) called 'failover' and 'failback' - a typical conversation in the sysadmin team might go -

"we had a power outage, 'up' has gown down, but luckily 'down' is still up! 'failover' has failed so the application has failed over to 'failback'"

Cheers ;o)

Duncan

[Vincent Farrugia]

I'd name them names of my favourite tennis players (women of course :-) )

For D-Class: Daniela
For K-Class: Kim
For L-Class: Lina
For A-Class: Anna
For S-Class: Serena
For V-Class: Venus

etc. etc. etc...

Vince

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

It of course all depends on the size of your network, the complexity, the (brand of the) machines it is composed of, and the age of the machines

Back in the time that we had one machine for each vendor, we just called the machines 'hp', 'ibm' (this one is actually still alive), 'sparc', 'risc', and 'mcx'. But as time made us replace systems, and HP became more important, and 9.04 was replaced by 10.00, 10.01 and 10.20 and later by 11.00, we could not stick to 'hp' which would be rather ambiguous in communications :)

Our network is rather small (max 5 servers active/configured (a.o.t. on-line) at the time, and - because we use NFS a lot, we chose extremely short names, because we have to type that a lot. So the 9000/D390 became 'd3', the 9000/L1000 became 'l1', the 9000/A500 became 'a5' and the IBM RS6000/43P became 'i2' (as being identical hardware to the 'ibm' it was the 2nd IBM, hence 'i2').

One thing we learned in the beginning (when the network was even smaller and we wanted to call our 9000/K100 'k') is to *never* call your system a single letter name. Try to use such a system from a network with M$ machines :P (net share l1:// is no problem, but it will interpret k://... as a local disk :( )

Our ??? 0.01

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

And I also read about a team that named their machines after very expensive wines, and put the label of the corresponding bottle on the front of the machine. I like that idea

[Tracey]

I eventually did name them after characters in King Arther. The guys in the office were a little upset when I named the largest machine Queen. :) The newest one I am debating over Bard or Jester - Probably will be Jester since it is an old machine (K460) given a new function.

I found that suddenly that I had not left 19 feedbacks when I had a perfect record - couldn't for the life of me figure out how I had forgotten THAT many. Thanks for the new post lookup, or I probably never would have thought to look at a post that I posted this long ago. :)

[Mark Landin]

The trick in any scheme is to get a name space which won't be exhausted quickly. It sucks to run out of machine names and start another scheme. :) The following schemes have at least 20 or more names, which should be adequate for small networks (unless you are running all Windows servers, in which case you sometimes need 20 servers just as Domain Controllers...)

My current site uses weather phenomena ... Rain, Wind, Lightning, Blizzard, etc.

A previous site used Native American tribe names ... Cherokee, Apache, Choctaw, Hopi, etc.

Two other schemes which could be used in the right situations: 1) US presidents and 2) books of the Bible. These may not be suitable in some environments, of course. :)

[Paul Thomson_2]

We have many servers in airports so call these according to the airport and country code.

eg gblhru01
gb (great britain)
lhr (london heathrow)
u (Unix)
01 (Server number)

[F.J.Llorente Wayfarer]

In my case, I've found very useful greek mythology... You have a dozen of 'great' gods for the main servers and literally hundreds of 'minor' gods and heroes for the rest... Hence, you can use...
Zeus - Main server
Hermes - Of course... Mail!
Caronte - Gateway (Charont! Remember I'm spanish...)
Marte - The -ehem- Quake server (Mars)
Ulyses, Jason, Argos - Portable computers
..and so on... Use your imagination. My own computer is Prometeo (Prometheus)... 'the one who brings the light from the gods to the users'
Beautiful yet simple scheme, isn't it?

By the way, i was once working for a belgian company that named their servers as beers (there are thousands of beer names in Belgium). We, the spanish branch, used spanish beers (San Miguel, Mahou...) I think is another good idea.

Mmmhh... by the way... should a French company use cheese names?

Hehehe... My two Euro cents...

Javier

[Ralph Grothe]

Since our company hosts so many servers of many different makes with different OSes, which are administered or accessed by so many people, you can find this diversity also expressed in the names of the boxes.
Often it depends on the personal tastes and likes of either customer, project responsables, and sysadmins.
Just a few examples.
One of our project has its servers named after rivers (mostly German).
Choosing such ubiquitious entities like rivers, cities, mountains, animals etc. you may never run short of names, and still can select crisp, exotic, or well-sounding names.
A sysadmin collegue of ours, who is responsible for Win NT, 2000, XP servers for instance is a STAR WARS freak, and thus names his servers after characters from the trilogy.
Other servers at ours are named after comic characters (e.g. donald, dagobert, daisy, bart, homer etc.).
Yet another naming scheme chose famous detectives and their assistents (e.g. holmes/watson, clousseau/dreyfuss)
This particular scheme seems especially well suited for clusters with stand-by nodes (viz. the detectives' assistents).
Then we have servers named after the planets of our solar system (ok, this only leaves you 9 names ;)
Then there are names of gods, goddesses, heroes of greek mythology.
On the other hand there are those more or less dull, mere technical names, which have part of the project name which they serve for.

[Chris Wilshaw]

If you have a large number of servers, you can use name them after chemical elements.

[Ian Dennison_1]

I work for a German Auto Manufacturer who like German and Car-Racing Hostnames; unfortunately being neither German or car-mad, the only names I can think of are old Concentration Camps.

'Don't mention the war!' - Basil Fawlty

Share and Enjoy! Ian

[Ernesto Cappello]

HI ... good question ...
I come from SICILY (Italy) and i've given the name of Magna Grecia.
For example
Pitagora ... Aristotele ... Socrate ... etc etc
Bye and Regards.
Ernesto.

[D. Jackson_1]

Here are a few:

opsman = Omniback PrintSpool Manager
itoman = ITO Manager
vpoman = VPO Manager
devmlm = Developement MLM
prdmlm = Production MLM

qasdbu = QAS Database
prddbu = PRD Database
devdbu = DEV Database

HTH

[Dave Chamberlin]

I go with astromonical names - constellations (88 to choose from like vela, scorpius, lyra etc). One old job (a chemistry department) had the elements scheme (hydrogen, carbon etc). At my previous job (an observatory). Each telescope had a color theme and each system was named a variant of that color - the blue theme had names like teal, indigo, cyan. It was nice to be able to associate the color to a particular telescope - but it was a pain to remember how to spell some obscure colors...

[Volker Borowski]

Funny that this thread after nearly a sleep of one year is as popular as it has been last year. Seems to be a never ending topic.

(Zero points for me please, I got my five last year)

I'll watch this one and I wonder what else will show up here :-)
Volker

[Martin Johnson]

I was at a customer site that had a 3 node cluster: Moe/Larry/Curly
and a 3 node cluster: Abbot/Costello
and a standalone system: Skelton


Marty

[Patrick Preuss]

hi,

we use for the hostname a combination of the funtion, two cacaters, and two digits.

for the correspondig lan console we ad lc01 for any lan adapter we use a combination from the above plus two caracters hw type of the if plus two digit number.

-PP

[BKUMAR]

Hi There,

you can fix the combination as a formula

Servermake(2)+ApplnPrfx(4)+Dev/prod/qa(1)+serl/location no(2)

serl/location - you can codify your remote branches/sites you can give state codes....like MA (masachustes) IL (Illinoius)

for example your appln are financials,web appln......

hpfinad01
ibfinad01
sufinad01

that is our standards.....hth...
enjoy

[John Carr_2]

Hi

for you gys in the UK im sure you will reconise my three servers compo, clegg and foggy.

For you not so fortunate to live here they are the three characters in a TV comedy called last of the summer wine.

cheers
John.

[Andre Braganca]

Our IP addresses are divided in ranges which have a geographical or functional meaning to us. We had a coding convention for names in which we could "read" the type of machine and it's IP. We also tried to code the server function, but found that this changes too often. We are replacing this with a code with more information:

1st letter = Server or Client
2nd letter = Platform (unix, windows, etc)
3rd and 4th = location (IP)
5th or 6th or 7th = last IP field

As we can easily read the "code" and know which server we're talking about, we find it more usefull than using "themes".

Cheers.

[Mark Landin]

Note that the distinction between a "windows", "unix", "linux", etc machine will probably become quite a bit more blurred in the next couple of years.