What names to you give your servers?

[Tracey]

I'm tired of naming my machines incomprehensible combinations of letters and numbers, or naming them their "function" when those functions change all the time. I'm thinking of naming my new machines after characters in the ledgend of King Arthur. For example, I think I will call my development machine "Merlin" since they always want us to perform some sort of magic with our source code!

What sort of interesting names to you call your servers?

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
Why reinvent the wheel ?
dvlp01 to dvlp99 for development
prod01 for production

or :

hp + short for location and ##
sun .....



rgds
Alexander M. Ermes

[eran maor]

Hi

i names all my new computer with the names
of the heroes from the lord of the rings

my preerred is bilbo .

nice one no ?

[Christopher Caldwell]

South Park characters.

ike
timmy
cartman

etc.

[someone_4]

Well we have gone though machine naming here.
At firt were were doing Mtholgy gods.
IE hercules,athena,apollo, my favorite
Hermes for the mail server. Then we went a more tradational route. lvapp01 being
location service number. When we changed we all got confused because we did it soo fast and so quick. My big suggestion here is find something you like and stick with it. It is a nightmare relearning names for boxes.

Richard

[Tracey]

Alex,

Why reinvent the wheel? Hp1 hp2 is similar to what I have now, it is boring! Also have you ever associated an ip address of .9 to a machine called hp2 - kind of confusing too!

But if it works for you, great!

[Patrick Wallek]

There really is not set rule for naming machines. It is whatever you want the machine name to be. If it is descriptive, that's fine, if not, that's OK too.

The company I currently work for uses interesting names, but if you think about, they also tell of the function of the machine. For example:

our mail server is clavin -- named after Cliff Claving, the postman in Cheers
our home directory server is cabana -- a form of a dwelling
our accounting machine is scrooge -- after either Scrooge McDuck (cartoons) or the Dickens character Scrooge, both misers with money.

I could go on, but you get the idea. At my previous job, I named all the machines with various Star Trek names.

It doesn't really matter. I like to have fun with them, why be boring?!

[someone_4]

Hey Patrick ..
I like that for a mailserver clavin ,
Even Newman would be good too.

Richard

[Shannon Petry]

We use a mixture, depending on the location of the maching, as such
SS#TY$$$

SS= City
# = 0 for servers 1 for clients
TY = type of maching
su=sun, hp=hp, ib=ibm, sg=sgi, nt=windblows
In some instances the TY can be used more definitively, I.E. or=oracle, fe=compute server, etc...
$$$=last 3 of the IP
I'd say that once a format is defined, then stick with it. I have had to work at sites who had hosts like "mickey, goofy, merlin, daffy, etc..." WHile kind of humerous, and showed the personality of who sat there, there was no rhyme or reason to this convention, and if someone left, the next guy would not like to work on minnie! (well, maybe, but....)

Just remember that for WIN compatability, you need to keep your host names to 8 characters or less. If you go more, then most win32 systems will never be able to find anything!

Regards,
Shannon
Regards,
Shannon

[Volker Borowski]

Hi Tracy,

whatever the logical sense of a computer name may be, never user more than 8 characters and no special characters and no underscorses.

For fun, I like to use animal names on small teams esp. workstations:

trout, pike, bass, .... (developer)
tiger, lion, cougar, .... (managers :)
deer, elk, moose, ... (kind people)
lizzy, worm, spider, ... (will not tell here :)

For servers I like some description related to the job (fs=fileserver, db=dbserver, airportcodes=location ...)

hamfs01
ffmdb03

Volker

[Wodisch]

Hello Tracey,

even if some of us might consider me to be a
spoilsport, I would recommend against function
names being part of the hostnames - for one
very simple reason: hackers/crackers/crunchers
or just call them black hats!
Try to imagine some of those to get access to
a list of stations of yours. If they find some
hostnames like
1) merlin, frodo, gandalf
2) mailsrv, oracle8, acct07, sap03
3) hp04, sun02, ibm01, linux7
what would the learn from that?
Well, I guess, most of us (and perhaps them)
would think list 1) contains admin's stations,
list 2) contains server names, and list 3)
tells about the operating system.
Hence they would try to estimate passwords of
admins (ever used "snoopy"???), break into
well known ports of servers, and/or try the
"weakness of the week" on the appropriate OS...

But I do like the animals approach ;-)

Just my $0.02

Wodisch

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Tracey,

Having worked in both worlds over the years, I now prefer the whimsical naming convention.
One of my employers used the 'vjxw97', 'vgrw15', 'alak78' scheme (there was some logic to this but I won't elaborate) and the upshot of this was that nobody outside of IT knew where, what, or anything about these machines. To make it even better, many of the devices (which might have even been printers) were not even labled.

Currently, I use, for example, cartoon characters for each location's servers and workstations. I make an attempt to associate the hostname with some aspect of the server's function. Sandbox Server - 'bugs', Firewall Server - 'taz' (obviously the theme at this particular location is Warner Bros.; at another plant it might be Rocky & Bullwinkle)

I have noticed that the cartoon names are much easier to remember and associate than 'vjxw97'.

I have one other convention that works well.
Name printer's for the person they are closest to. Never mind that Julie no longer works here (everybody knows where she used to work except the new guy and who cares about him).

My 3 cents worth, Clay

[Stefan Farrelly]

A lot of HP sites ive been to use planets and moons. Some have almost used up all in our solar system and now resort to using comets also.

[Abel Berger]

Hi Eran,
I names my servers with the names
of the enterprise crew, for example...
Spoc, Dr. Macoy, etc,

I hope this help !!!
Regards
Abel Berger

[Gram Ludlow]

I was in a mixed NT/Unix environment for a while. We named all our servers after people in Star Wars.

Our NT servers were Vader and Jabba, our unix servers were Yoda, Luke, etc. Light side v Dark side! It was a great scheme...

[Tracey]

Great names! I like the idea of having an easily pronounceable - not lpsp1 - which is one option if I name for company, division, etc.

If I go with my original idea of Merlin for the dev machine, then I need a name for an oracle in King Arthur's court for our Oracle DB server. The closest (pronouncable) thing I can come up with is "sage". Then of course what do we name the NT server that will be running Weblogix?

Don't you just love getting new machines?

[Mark Vollmers]

We have a somewhat boring set of names, I guess. I just set them up with names in the order that they came in (NT stations and UNIX), like engpro1, engpro2, etc. LIke I said, it's boring, but easy to remember what the name is. An added bonus is that I can move the workstation between departments as needed without worrying about the naming convention now not holding. I would think something like this would be easier with large numbers of computers. There are only so many Jedi, after all :)

Mark

[Peggy Fong]

In a very large shop with hundreds of servers and platforms we ended up using a standard convention so that we would know the location of the server, the hardware platform, type of server (dev, prod, test, app, ora, or ?) and number of servers related.

1 character represented the city/data center
2 character represented the hardware platform
s=sun
h=hp
i=ibm
3 character represented type of server
p=production
t/q=test or qc box
d=development
can make up others
4-7 made up to help identify group using servers, function, whatever we wanted.
8 (could use character from 4-7 if needed. This was a # to represent server 1, server 2, server 3, etc within group (eg, 50 servers for ssi, 100 servers for payroll, 10 servers for ... etc)

Not exciting but sure helps everyone support these servers. They were documented so if everyone left, someone else would know what the convention was, and what it meant.

Our workstations we named after mythical gods, or disney characters or star trek names, etc. since they were ours to support the mid-range systems.

Just another way of doing business.
Peggy

[John Poff]

Hi,

I would have preferred to name our machines something cool and fun (Tolkien characters, cartoons, etc.) but we had some no-nonsense people in charge when we installed our boxes, so here is what we wound up with.

The first two characters are from our company name: fd

The next two characters are the O/S type: ux for HP-UX, lx for Linux

The next two characters are the main application on the box: db for database, ap for application server, dd for development, ov for OpenView, to for tools

The last two characters are numeric. So we wind up with names like:

fduxdb01
fduxap02
fdlxsa03

It's not very exciting, but it works.

[boley janowski]

here's a name for you, "Yes_Masteer". I usually name my servers after raceing sponsors, like motor oils, car company's, or that big dog down the street. "Big_Dawg", I usually get away with it on development until management wants to make it meaning full to someone else.

Good topic!

[Michael Tully]

I was at a place once where we called
a system 'beaver', after someone we
obviously didn't like.....

just some humour....
Michael

[Mark Fenton]

I've been in several shops where the servers were all named by unimaginative people. It makes things easier for the bean counters, but not so interesting for the people who actually have to work with the things.

Being typical rebels looking for ways to get around the system, we convinced the management that we'd have an easier time remembering our way around the systems if we could name them something a little more memorable than "absunsvr1" or the like.

We started with basketball and football players, using rookies for the new machines and more seasoned players for the older ones. We wanted to rename our aging AT&T minicomputers after dinosaurs, but this suggestion was shot down by the boss.

Still, the sports star theme made it easy to remember the age of a system (they're only rookies their first year....)

[Tracey]

The corporate office for the large company I work for has a policy that I just found out about (been here 6+ years) and I was told that I must name them xxx111 - we can use the xxx for anything we want, but the 111 has to be the three digit for our street address. Well "corporate" is in NJ and they all have 3 digit street numbers - all well and good. But here in the south, we have 4 digit numbers for our building - so we have to chop one off - then of course what do we do with the guys who are actually at 111 in NJ? Corporate didn't think this policy all the way through I think.

Well, we will name them according to their standards, but I still have my aliasing don't I? :)

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

Nice to see someone else use lord of the rings... in my case bilbo's a D that currently needs reinstalling and strider is the only one that's been up for over a year non stop!

I thought of planets but uranus isn't really all that well named... dinosaurs are too difficult to spell, so for my latest relatively large network, I name it after us states (and try to avoid
massachussetts.. I could only name 10 off the top of my head :)

Later,
Bill

[Ravi_8]

i name all my servers in the great rivers, mountains which are followed by makers name like : hphimalaya,sunganga,aixamazon etc....