[HN Gopher] RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
___________________________________________________________________
RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
Author : rdpintqogeogsaa
Score : 188 points
Date : 2021-02-07 10:25 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tools.ietf.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (tools.ietf.org)
| chewxy wrote:
| I have named my machines after Doctor Who planets for the last 18
| ish years. All new machines start as Gallifrey (workstation) or
| TARDIS (laptop).
|
| Then as they stop being my primary devices they get other planet
| / ship names. The torrenting machine was suitably called Skaro.
| :p
|
| Two exceptions are my PiHole and OctoPi. The old PiHole used to
| be called TimeLock but when I upgraded I didn't keep the name
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Kind of weird when it lists _names of killers_ as a theme name...
| einpoklum wrote:
| Brief summary of the RFC (to save you the read):
|
| * Don't overload other terms already in common use.
|
| * Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine.
|
| * Don't use your own name.
|
| * Don't use long names.
|
| * Avoid alternate spellings.
|
| * Avoid domain names.
|
| * Avoid domain-like names.
|
| * Don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names.
|
| * Don't use digits at the beginning of the name.
|
| * Don't use non-alphanumeric characters in a name.
|
| * Don't expect case to be preserved.
|
| * Use words/names that are rarely used.
|
| * Use theme names.
|
| * Use real words.
|
| * Don't worry about reusing someone else's hostname.
|
| * There is always room for an exception.
| rphln wrote:
| The naming scheme I settled on for my devices was using ship
| names from World War 2.
|
| - Device size and computing power maps roughly to the ship size:
| my desktop is named after a battleship, while my Kindle is named
| after a destroyer.
|
| - Servers are always named after carriers. It just made sense to
| me somehow.
|
| - Like the warships, the names can eventually get reused as the
| devices are replaced.
| curtis3389 wrote:
| 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 '/^$/d' | shuf -n 1
|
| i.e. <print file> | <skip first line> | <split lines into words>
| | <remove empty lines> | <choose random line>
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Once I was moved to a new team at work, and the team leader
| really wanted a team name. I generated like 5 or 10 words from
| /usr/share/dict/words, one of which was profanity. I could tell
| that everyone liked Team Profanity, but no one was brave enough
| to adopt it. I really wish we had, because there was much
| cursing on that team.
| freedomben wrote:
| Minor correction: path is /usr/share/dict/words
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Thanks, fixed.
| gspr wrote:
| I use animals, mostly. Except any ARM-based device _must_ be
| named after a limb or a part of a limb that is not an arm. It
| must.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| I use food. Abstract, but also memorable.
| kps wrote:
| Personally -- since we're all chiming in -- I use elements.
| My fallback DNS is a periodic table.
| salamander014 wrote:
| Please tell me you assign IP addresses based on atomic
| weight!
|
| This might be the coolest thing I've read all year...
| [deleted]
| logifail wrote:
| Back at Uni we got four new workstations so obviously I
| named them 'death', 'war', 'famine' and 'pestilence'. Then
| shortly after we added a fifth, it ended up being
| 'mayhem'.*
|
| Some time later we got two more boxen and the female
| members of our research group were given the job of naming
| them, and we ended up with 'itchy' and 'scratchy'...
|
| * for the Pratchett readers I was wrong, it should of
| course have been 'Kaos'...
| luckman212 wrote:
| Here's a more concise version, minus a few forks!
| sed "$((RANDOM % 1632 + 1))q;d" words.txt
|
| Grab this cleaned wordlist with 1 word per line:
| wget http://nerab.github.io/wordlist/words.txt
| jsanders9 wrote:
| I use the method in 'a proper naming' scheme linked here and am
| very happy with it. It solves all the problems mentioned in
| other threads here.
|
| It is fairly straightforward to incorporate into your
| infrastructure as code workflow for managing your "cattle".
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _EDIT: found it:https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-
| scheme/_
|
| One problem I see, specifically for the environment, is that
| "dev" is now a TLD ( _thanks Google!_ ), so you have to be
| careful should you try to do a short cut like "web01.dev" you
| may get a surprise depending on your _resolv.conf_ :
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.dev
|
| Lots of 'generic' TLDs now thanks to ICANN:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-
| level_dom...
|
| There's both ".accountant" and ".accountants".
|
| The article describes geographic sub-domains, and uses "nyc" as
| an example, but that's a TLD now as well. It may be better to
| use UN/LOCODE as a starting point:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN/LOCODE
|
| If you don't need down to the city/municipal level, then ISO
| 3166-2 may be useful (<nation><hyphen><subnational>):
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2
| tyingq wrote:
| Resource tags, like the ones supported by Vmware, AWS, and other
| cloud providers would be more important to me than a server name.
| I suppose for old-school bare-metal on-prem, you could put tags
| in DNS TXT records and some database.
| dehrmann wrote:
| On thing I've seen work well for corporate networks is use a
| different domain for infra than for public-facing servers.
| jjice wrote:
| For personal machines I use fiction locations from media I enjoy.
| My laptop is Hyrule, my desktop is Konoha, and my Pi is
| MotherBase, but I spell mine all lowercase.
|
| For servers I use for my roommates and I (Jellyfin and the like),
| we name them after the quirky students that go to our university
| that we appreciate.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Based on the long response time, I think we've hugged the IETF
| httpd to death which is somewhat funny considering who runs it.
| hoppla wrote:
| For some reason, when doing a fresh OS install, the hostname step
| is the bottleneck and takes too long to complete. Distros should
| really prioritize optimizing this part of the installer!
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Certain sets are finite, such as the seven dwarfs. When you
| order your first seven computers, keep in mind that you will
| probably get more next year.
|
| We ran into this years ago when we named our machines after the
| Marx Brothers. We started out with Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo. When
| two more arrived, we used Chico and Gummo. IIRC we added Karl,
| Deutsche, Skid, Birth and Spencer before giving in and adopting a
| proper 'cattle not pets' convention (which, by the way, isn't
| covered by TFA).
| yorwba wrote:
| > a proper 'cattle not pets' convention (which, by the way,
| isn't covered by TFA).
|
| It is:
|
| ...
|
| _Of course, they could have called the second one "shop2" and
| so on. But then one is really only distinguishing machines by
| their number. You might as well just call them "1", "2", and
| "3". The only time this kind of naming scheme is appropriate is
| when you have a lot of machines and there are no reasons for
| any human to distinguish between them. For example, a master
| computer might be controlling an array of one hundred
| computers. In this case, it makes sense to refer to them with
| the array indices._
| majewsky wrote:
| Remember that this was written in 1990. Kubernetes wasn't
| around back then.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Computer names are like function names. The edge of your system
| _needs good names_.
|
| The ones in the middle can quite happily be anonymous / referred
| to only by their address.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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, cities and so on and it's
| confusing as hell. How am I suppose to remember that Ford and
| Volvo are your two web servers? Now I need to maintain a list
| mappings for your servers and look them up every time I need to
| change your web configuration. Just call them prod-
| web01.company.com and prod-web02.company.com, it's fine and
| everyone will be able to guess what those servers do.
|
| You can also do web01.prod.company.com and
| web01.test.company.com, but while it looks cleaner (and I
| personally prefer it) is does hide the "prod" or "test" in most
| shells, so you constantly need to check that you're not messing
| with a production box.
| alexjplant wrote:
| Cute naming schemes are a holdover from the days of physical
| servers when location, function, etc were subject to change so
| an immutable machine name couldn't contain them. Now that most
| things are virtual and easily created/destroyed there's no good
| reason _not_ to name functionally. The most common refrain I've
| heard in defense of these archaic naming practices is that "we
| don't want the hackers to know which server does what" but if
| they've managed to get your root DNS zone file or a shell on a
| box then you're already pretty far gone anyway (not to mention
| that nmap exists). All it does is impede productivity and
| create the illusion of security.
|
| If you are dealing with assets in a physical environment then
| obviously the above doesn't apply.
|
| As a side note: a long time ago (before I knew what I was
| doing) I ran a Windows Server environment for my dad's
| business. The main server was Jake and the off-site backup was
| Elwood.
| 1996 wrote:
| > Now that most things are virtual and easily
| created/destroyed there's no good reason _not_ to name
| functionally.
|
| Uh, my servers with at least 256G of RAM and a raid60 of more
| drives than you have virtual machines can't easily be moved
| around.
|
| > If you are dealing with assets in a physical environment
| then obviously the above doesn't apply.
|
| Yes, baremetal, the only way to guarantee performance!
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > Yes, baremetal, the only way to guarantee performance!
|
| Single function bare metal, that is. At which point, the
| boring functional naming scheme re-applies easily.
|
| If you're running multiple different functions on a single
| box, how are you guaranteeing any performance for any
| single function? How does that differ from using a
| hypervisor with similar limiting features?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You'll need a mapping for the server names anyway. If you have
| a large datacenter, I hope it's stored as configuration of your
| infrastructure as code tool, if it's small, you won't need to
| check it every time.
|
| Anyway, is prod-web01 that server with an outdated web server
| that you keep because of that one system that couldn't migrate,
| the one with a Java server that runs those proprietary tools,
| the one with IIS that runs that FOSS code that the developer
| decided to write in C#, the one supporting your main
| applications or the one you insulated in a special network
| because it hosts a powerful API that you don't want to expose?
| jwalton wrote:
| "prod-web02" implies that this is the second web server in a
| cluster of web servers. That makes a lot of sense in 2021,
| where "prod-web02" is likely an AWS instance or a docker VM
| that is doing nothing but serving web pages, and which exists
| in some cloud server where you will never see the physical
| machine it is running on.
|
| This was written in 1990, though, and there was no cloud, and
| VMs were quite rare things, (and we had to walk to school
| uphill, both ways, in the snow). Machines were physical things,
| and no one had the budget to buy an entire computer to be the
| second production web server - a machine ran a lot of different
| daemons that did a lot of different things, and the roles and
| responsibilities of a given physical piece of hardware would
| change as time went on. Which is still true today, but today
| it's just that a machine runs a lot of docker containers
| instead of running a lot of daemons, and we don't care where
| the docker containers are running, whereas back then we very
| much cared what machine it was running on, because sometimes we
| had to go to that machine and reboot it or kick it or install
| more RAM.
|
| At the time, I was working at Alcatel (before it was Alacatel-
| Lucent, before that became Nokia), on a 450Gbps switch which
| was used for things like routing satellite TV feeds or handling
| distribution from big fiber backhauls, or running LANe for
| small nations. On the third floor, we had several racks of
| these switches in "the lab" which we used for testing and
| development work. While you could push a new software load from
| the comfort of your desk, if you borked things badly enough
| you'd sometimes have to go downstairs and plug a serial cable
| into the front of the control card so you could go poke around
| and force the card into a sane state.
|
| So, when a new hire came in, they might say, "Hey mrweasel, I
| uploaded a bad load to Spock, and it's stuck in a boot loop.
| Where can I find that physical machine?" And you'd say, "Head
| down to the third floor, turn left out of the elevators, walk
| to the second last row of racks. On your left there should be
| switches named "Picard", "Riker", "Deana", etc..., and on your
| right should be "Kirk", "McCoy", and friends. Spock is third on
| the right between McCoy and Uhuru."
|
| That conversation is way more confusing if all of these
| machines are named "test01-test20". You couldn't even name them
| that - there were lots of different products in different areas
| of the lab, so you'd need the product name in there, and they'd
| be "rsp7670-test01" through "rsp7670-test20".
|
| And, when you want to push a new build from your desk, it's way
| less likely you'll mistype "picard" when you want to update
| "data", but it's quite easy to accidentally clobber
| "rsp7670-test05" when you mean to overwrite "rsp7670-test06",
| which was sure to summon an angry developer to your desk asking
| why you just killed their 48 hour validation testing, 45 hours
| in.
| tssva wrote:
| "or running LANe for small nations."
|
| I had the joy of working on several ATM to the desktop campus
| networks using LANE and an ATM WAN using LANE to connect
| several thousand locations for an organization belonging to a
| large nation state. Thanks for triggering some horrible
| memories. ;)
| jwalton wrote:
| I spent an entire weekend, dialed in by modem from Canada
| to a certain oil exporting middle eastern country, trying
| to figure out why the control plane for the ATM WAN that
| ran LANE for all their hospitals and 911 services was down.
| Fun times. :P
| p_l wrote:
| 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 similar crap, is well described by another
| comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054487 -
| which I like to put as "named systems are the systems you care
| about"
|
| In fact, I'll go with seemingly unpopular opinion that there
| are only pets, never cattle. The pets just happen to have
| components, but at some level of the stack you're hitting a
| precious pet. Even if said pet is "us-east-1 Lambda service"
| spenczar5 wrote:
| > I'll go with seemingly unpopular opinion that there are
| only pets, never cattle.
|
| This is emphatically not true beyond a certain point, perhaps
| around 500 boxes or so. My last job involved working on a
| fleet of about 15,000 hosts; I can promise that extremely few
| of the servers were precious pets. They really were cattle,
| and we would blow away and reimage them into different
| functions (with hostnames matching the function) moderately
| frequently.
| p_l wrote:
| Ehh, it's actually a topic for a yet-unfinished article of
| mine, but note that I pointed that "us-east-1 lambda
| service" is still a pet.
|
| In the case you described, whatever drives the replacement
| system is the pet - the so-called cattle are just
| "components" that became interchangeable for the bigger
| "pet" system. As another commented called it, you need good
| names at the edge - where the edge for me is the level
| where you care about the system. We used to care about
| individual components of a computer and those would be
| effectively "pets" of the time. Nowadays, you do not give
| name to a DIMM in your server nor take extra care to ensure
| it works. And so on, till you reach the level you actually
| have to care, and that's where you need to name it (IMO)
| because that's your pet, even if it's composed of what
| people call cattle.
|
| As for hostnames matching functions - I found much more use
| when making hostnames reflect basic type of hw and physical
| location, and would keep the name as long as the location
| didn't change. The rest depended on what functions were
| currently applied to the machine.
| geofft wrote:
| Why can't you rename the host if its function changes? Like
| if "the 1U box with asset tag XY1Z234" goes from being a web
| server to a DB server, why not reinstall it and call it db03?
|
| I think the approach of naming the host "freddy" works for
| small installations (and all installations in 1990 were
| small), where reinstalling a single server is a manual
| process and impacts your capacity, and where humans remember
| "Oh, freddy is the one with a very large hard drive." If
| you've got any sort of automation, let alone virtualization,
| you should be keeping facts about hardware somewhere other
| than people's heads and so you can index them by the actual
| identity of the hardware - the fact that web04 had a large
| disk last year is remembered by a field on your inventory
| entry for XY1Z234, not by any human. And reinstalling web04
| as db02 is just a matter of running a script from the comfort
| of your work-from-home laptop - certainly no need to visit
| the datacenter.
|
| I think this lines up with your point about pets being higher
| levels of abstraction - I wouldn't point any DNS client at
| dns01, since that's a specific server, I'd point it at a
| virtual IP that can be bound (possibly multicast) by any
| dnsNN server that happens to be up. That virtual IP is the
| pet and the API surface, and it belongs to no actual server.
| p_l wrote:
| Maybe it depends on how big pockets one used to have, and
| how willing one was to follow vendors jealously declaring
| their software should be the only thing running on the
| server.
|
| In my experience, unless a server was a VM host (or, these
| days, k8s cluster), it was rare that it would be single
| function. We just didn't have the money to allow such waste
| of resources. So unless you had single-software with enough
| requirements to hog the whole box (usually DB servers),
| then everything tended to have multiple functions, and
| reimaging was rarer event.
|
| So I prefer to have "Freddy the web serving system", which
| might contain several machines named in style of
| _R04-24.SFO.i.contoso.com_ ;) - because "freddy the web
| serving system" is the part that I care, and individual
| components enter everyday care only in the metrics of
| capacity planning dashboard.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There is a good point to the drift of functions. You just
| need to run this one thing, and you do have that server which
| could just run it. It's a very real thing.
|
| Where I see this most often is with companies that place a
| unusual high cost on servers, virtual machines or containers.
| In those cases I normally just application servers, that's a
| good a description as any. The only difference is that I
| won't thing twice about deleting a server called app01 and
| recreate it using Ansible, Puppet, docker-compose or whatever
| deployment tool that customer uses.
|
| In my mind there aren't "pets" any more, and if there is
| that's a mistake that needs to be corrected. The customers I
| deal with who have pet servers are the most dysfunctional and
| the ones with the most challenges, both technically and
| organisational.
| Nvorzula wrote:
| Some time ago I got into the habit of naming my home network
| after Pokemon that I happen to thought fit well. My Windows
| desktop is Charizard and it's Ubuntu dual boot is DarkCharizard.
| My fileserver/Docker box is Metagross. My wireless SSID is
| Raichu, my laptop is Pikachu, and my phone is Pichu. And so on.
| pawelmi wrote:
| Two hardest problems in IT: naming, cache invalidation and off by
| one.
| rgj wrote:
| 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.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| > So carbon.harbinger.com was x.x.x.6 and c.harbinger.com was a
| CNAME to carbon. oxygen or o was .8 etcetera.
|
| No wonder helium was mostly hanging ...
|
| Sorry, could not resist. It is a clever naming scheme. At one
| site a client used names from The Three Stooges, then they got
| the 6th server (exhausting the list of the lead characters).
| koolba wrote:
| When you split a workload from one to multiple machines, would
| it have to follow the rules of fission to decide where to run
| it?
| shagie wrote:
| One company that I worked at... while the hardware people had
| their boring "r17s4ad" type name (rack 17, shelf 4, application,
| development), our team used the naming scheme of Caribbean
| islands. This worked rather well.
|
| Unfortunately, I only remember the test and production server
| names. The test systems were "Trinidad" and "Tobago". The
| production systems where "Nevis" and "Nassau" (the app started
| with an 'N').
|
| The thing that made this work really well was that the first
| syllable hinted on what the rest of the word would be and then
| everything beyond that reinforced that you read it right. This
| even was the case that foreign accents, while slightly off still
| reinforced the "you heard this right".
|
| The machines _also_ had names of "test01" and "test02" or
| similar... but we (as devs) never used those names because you
| had to listen to the end of it to be sure that you had the right
| machines.
| pvinis wrote:
| I've had a nice scheme for naming my devices for a while. I have
| a list of my devices here, with explanations.
| https://pvin.is/post/my-device-naming-scheme
| moonbug wrote:
| what's tomorrow, a thread on last night's dreams? No one cares
| how you name your computers.
| diftraku wrote:
| A long-time personal favourite naming scheme of mine has been
| Pokemons (and by extension, Digimons).
|
| There's a good selection, it's pretty varied and there's no
| shortage of em (assuming you don't exceed 100-200 new systems in
| a 3 year period). This also has an accidental side-benefit of not
| being tasked to name new hosts at work, unless your really want
| to call the new database server Stufful, for example.
|
| Another thing to keep in mind with more descriptive hostnames
| like `database`, is to serialize them from the start. It's a very
| minor thing but after you have three hosts with one of them
| missing the serialization, it's going to stand out like a sore
| thumb and it could be a major undertaking on changing that name
| where it's used.
|
| When it comes to project names, there is a certain level of
| permanence that name (or codename) is going to have. Once chosen,
| that name will be thrown around in the codebase almost
| universally. The same does apply to the hostnames, at least in
| part when it comes to configuration files (and by extension,
| certain hard-coded hostnames that could linger around in the code
| years after the host in question has been decommissioned).
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > When it comes to project names, there is a certain level of
| permanence that name (or codename) is going to have. Once
| chosen, that name will be thrown around in the codebase almost
| universally. The same does apply to the hostnames, at least in
| part when it comes to configuration files (and by extension,
| certain hard-coded hostnames that could linger around in the
| code years after the host in question has been decommissioned).
|
| Or, as told by xkcd: https://xkcd.com/910/
| intrasight wrote:
| I am fondly recollecting my time as an undergraduate at CMU in
| the 80s. All the machines were named from cities and towns in
| Pennsylvania. Old-school bare-metal on-prem indeed. That time has
| largely passed as machines are ephemeral. Functional names make
| more sense now.
| jlgaddis wrote:
| At the risk of showing my age...
|
| In my own private home lab -- which has grown way too large -- I
| like using names of the Garbage Pail Kids [0] as hostnames.
|
| There's a few benefits to this naming scheme, when dealing with
| physical machines at least: 1) you can usually find a name that
| suits the "temperament" of the particular host and 2) you can
| tape the trading card to the host (or the rack, next to it) to
| make finding / identifying it easier.
|
| --
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Pail_Kids
| gbolcer wrote:
| AT UCI, they chose Paris Metro stops. All of them were hard to
| spell and pronounce, so we always made up shortened aliases.
| acomjean wrote:
| 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 (violin01, violin02, tuba01) and grouped
| by function types (percussion were the web servers)
|
| New cluster it's login01,login02 , the work cluster names I don't
| remember...
| cortesoft wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| Why is percussion01 better than web01?
| michaelmcdonald wrote:
| I'm assuming (based on reading how they performed grouping)
| that percussion01 didn't exist, but perhaps cymbal01 did
| (since a cymbal is a type of percussion instrument).
| Therefore cymbal01 would be a web server of sometime. The
| benefit to naming it this way is you could have multiple
| types of web servers (internal, dev, prod) and by using a
| more generic name you could more easily change the function
| of that web server (so cymbal servers could be dev, then move
| to prod, without needing a name change).
| cortesoft wrote:
| My feeling, though, is that you care more about the
| function of a machine than the physical machine itself. Why
| not change the machine name when you change it's purpose?
| There is no reason you need to know that the current prod
| web server used to be the dev server.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Shameless plug: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nsaname
|
| It probably needs updating. It's been a while since the last
| large leak.
| hyperrail wrote:
| The weirdest naming scheme for computers I've seen is the one
| used some years ago by my college: It named Linux workstations
| after Linux kernel committers' email usernames!
|
| There were the better-known folks like linus (Linus Torvalds [1])
| and gregkh (Greg Kroah-Hartman [2]), but also relatively more
| obscure people, like shemminger (Stephen Hemminger [3]) and
| stelian (Stelian Pop [4]).
|
| I didn't recognize most of those names at the time, but now that
| I do, I wonder what those people would have thought about having
| a large organization's computers named after them. A bit creeped
| out, I would think.
|
| [1] https://github.com/torvalds
|
| [2] http://www.kroah.com/log/
|
| [3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/networkplumber/
|
| [4] https://www.popies.net
| dls2016 wrote:
| I use Simpsons character names for VMs: FatTony, SexyFlanders,
| Krustofsky... never ending supply of names.
| hlehmann wrote:
| I've also always used Simpsons characters for my home machines.
| So far I've gone through itchy, scratchy, krusty, blinky, moe,
| and edna.
| cy6erlion wrote:
| Shameless plug, CLI for reading IETF RFCs.
| https://github.com/cy6erlion/ietf
|
| You will read this RFC like this:
|
| $ ietf -n 1178
| majewsky wrote:
| Alternative method for Arch Linux: Install the `rfc` package,
| then find the RFC at /usr/share/doc/rfc/txt/rfc1178.txt. A very
| nice package to have installed when travelling far from an
| internet connection.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| why not just $ ietf 1178 ?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| krallja wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_mythological_fig...
| has been good for naming my workstations for decades. Dual-boot
| scenaria can use Roman/Greek names for the Mac/Windows or
| Win/Linux "personalities" of the same physical machine.
| rgj wrote:
| I once almost got fired because my computer was called
| aphrodite, the CTO had to demo my webapp, and he couldn't spell
| it correctly.
| indentit wrote:
| > Nobody expects to learn much about a person by their name.
|
| That's a good point, but humans are very different to computers -
| machines (be they physical or virtual) are provisioned for a
| specific purpose (even if that is to be "Fred's PC"), whereas
| humans need time to grow and can decide for themselves what to do
| as a career / what their hobbies will be, and change it any time.
|
| But realistically, yes, the RFC is right that you may end up with
| machines whose purpose changes or multiple machines have the same
| purpose etc. But when they don't, it is much easier to have
| meaningful names. If you will name them differently, then please
| make sure all developers can access the list/mapping document and
| it is kept updated. It's frustrating if you want to investigate
| some production problems but end up looking at the wrong server's
| logs because devops didn't tell anyone they moved an application
| /website etc.
|
| I like someone else's comment about app01 being easier to reason
| about and recreate than something named more specifically, and in
| the modern world, its easy to spin up a new docker instance or VM
| so there's less need to "let's just add this small service on
| that machine because it has spare capacity" (where capacity could
| be CPU/RAM etc.)
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I use Harry Potter character names. There were hundreds of the
| mentioned off hand in the books, so I usually use obscure ones.
| They have the benefit of being easy to pronounce and spell:
| Mafalda Hopkirk, Silvanus Kettleburn, Irma Pince, etc.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_charact...
| RegW wrote:
| All devices in our house are creatures: griphook, fawkes,
| crookshanks, pigwidgeon, hedwig, aragog, firenze, grawp, etc.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Nice! I usually do creatures for more appliance-type devices
| and wizards for servers. But it is somewhat of an arbitrary
| division.
| mercora wrote:
| for virtual machines i tend to use names that belong to some
| other entity and call the hypervisor after that. for example
| Saturn and its moons, Africa and its countries or some authors
| and their works.
| kuter wrote:
| I was expecting this to be a April Fools RFC [0]. I was
| disappointed when I checked the date.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for..
| .
| DanBC wrote:
| One of the nicest "hidden" RFCs is RFC2468.
|
| https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468
|
| ("2 4 6 8, who do we appreciate")
| modderation wrote:
| On that note, I'm a bit surprised that RFC 2100 [1] hasn't seen
| any mention. It's quite relevant to the topic at hand.
|
| [1] The Naming of Servers https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2100
| [deleted]
| TickleSteve wrote:
| Also "IP over avian carriers"
| (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149)
|
| (IP via pigeons).
| throw0101a wrote:
| In 2009 someone found that a pigeon was faster at
| transferring data than their ISP:
|
| * https://www.wired.com/2009/09/in-africa-a-pigeon-
| transfers-d...
|
| * http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm
|
| * https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11325452
| kuter wrote:
| Frame Format The IP datagram is printed, on
| a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each
| octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The
| scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian
| carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the
| datagram's edges. The bandwidth is limited to the leg
| length. The MTU is variable, and paradoxically,
| generally increases with increased carrier age. A
| typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be
| needed. Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed
| and the paper copy of the datagram is optically
| scanned into a electronically transmittable form.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Over 5 years at working at Amazon (quite some time ago, I don't
| know what they do now) and we happily violated "no domain names"
| without any issue for linux servers. If you don't have linux
| boxes that span different networks it doesn't cause a problem to
| have server have one single domain name and have the hostname be
| the same. Linux boxes aren't proper security devices or router so
| don't use them as that and don't mutihome them. The routers and
| switches were given short names. These RFCs simply don't capture
| that there are rules you can adopt (and if you're big enough --
| which is not terribly big) then you can discard some of these
| suggestions completely. There is not a one-size-fits-all. I
| ignored this RFC's suggestion at a fairly massive scale for 5
| years and never had an issue.
|
| Also don't fall into the trap of just assigning random serial
| numbers to servers. I later worked somewhere that did this and it
| makes it difficult to communicate about the servers in the middle
| of outages. I've had communication issues where I've been talking
| to another engineer and I was using the first hex digits of the
| server name and they were using the last as shortcuts and we
| thought we were logged into different servers and it was the same
| one. You hardly ever want humans dealing with your server names,
| but when humans do need to use your server names it is one of the
| times that really matter because shit is on fire.
|
| Group them by single purpose of what the cluster does with some
| kind of incrementing number. The idea to use theme names and not
| "project" names is also deeply 100% wrong. When you have 100,000s
| of servers you run out of theme names and you'll fail to remember
| the name schemes in the middle of an outage. Name them after what
| the servers do, and keep them more or less reflecting their
| purpose. Consider carefully some kind of numbering scheme to keep
| the short names unique across datacenters so you don't have a
| dozen foo-101 servers. You may want to use incrementing serial
| numbers for both datacenters and cluster members or something so
| "foo-1-101" and number your datacenters (or logical cluster
| number if you're really big and stamp them out 30,000 at a time
| or something).
|
| Oh right this is the RFC from 1990. Yeah, shit has changed, this
| RFC needs to evolve.
|
| Back in 1990 when this was written a single system admin hand
| managing 20-30 servers was a lot. Web didn't exist. I can't
| recall any kind of load balancing or much clustering. You might
| have SunOS boxes running RIP doing routing across internal
| subnets that were 10baseT. NAT and firewalls weren't used much at
| all and servers would just sit on public IPs. This RFC is
| prehistoric.
| 1996 wrote:
| > Oh right this is the RFC from 1990. Yeah, shit has changed,
| this RFC needs to evolve.
|
| Like, don't name your MX wolfsschanze. It may cause problems
| with cancel culture raging on.
| bombcar wrote:
| Given that it seems you don't upgrade Linux Instalaciones between
| major revisions - I use short names that are unique in the first
| character or two and code the os/version. Sure it doesn't scale
| much but I don't have many servers and ssh u<tab> gets me where I
| need to be.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| We had to solve this problem for our TPU management system:
| https://www.tensorfork.com/tpus
|
| The most sensible naming scheme for us was to distinguish them by
| index. But there were two important differences: TPUs have many
| sizes, which means some are larger than others; if you're using a
| v3-256, you're very likely the only researcher doing so. They are
| also distinguished by type; v3 is more powerful than v2. Finally,
| they are region-based; the less powerful v2's are in the US,
| whereas the v3 fleet is mainly EU based.
|
| That led to the convention of tpu-v3-8-euw4a-1,
| tpu-v2-256-usc1a-0, and so on.
|
| The "tpu-" prefix might seem redundant, but I find it's helpful
| in conversation. That's a personal preference though, and if I
| had to do it again I'd probably drop the tpu- prefix entirely.
|
| I found this scheme was horrible for VMs though. TPUs are often
| used for specific training runs, and the scheme above is easily
| added to bash files / config scripts. But for VMs, you're often
| SSH'ing into them all the time.
|
| Ultimately we started naming the VMs after the researchers who
| originally needed them. Our current primary training box is
| song.tensorfork.com, named after researcher songpeng who it was
| created for. So the SSH scheme was pleasant:
| song@song.tensorfork.com for him, shawn@song.tnesorfork.com for
| me, arfa@, aydao@, etc.
|
| When arfa neded a VM, I simply named it arfa.
|
| All other more complicated naming schemes failed with time. No
| one (including me) could remember long VM names, let alone ones
| with numbers in them.
|
| The other scheme that persisted was to use anime characters, as
| emersion mentioned. Tensorfork itself runs off of vegeta, which
| is my personal Hetzner server. "goku" was one of our primary
| workhorses at one point, due to its large VM size.
|
| Our final two VMs are named "test" and "nuck", which also seem to
| work quite well (much to my surprise). "Is test down?" is almost
| completely unambiguous. And it's easy to remember which one is
| which: "nuck" is in Canada, so therefore "test" is the one in
| europe.
|
| A pattern emerges here: most of our VM names are _short, four-
| letter identifiers_ : arfa, song, test, nuck, goku, with vegeta
| being the standout. All other conventions failed with time.
| emersion wrote:
| Use anime character names. That way you have an excuse to collect
| cute artwork for these machines.
| jjice wrote:
| That's a great scheme. I hope that one day amongst the
| university computer labs named for Greek/Roman mythology or
| rock artists, we have a lab of anime characters. At least at my
| uni, I think a lot of people would get a kick out of that.
| netflixandkill wrote:
| It's easy to be nostalgic for the days of big iron servers or
| clusters that were around for years as a sort of network
| landmarks. We used to have dev and QA clusters named after
| movie monsters and you'd get some great hallway conversations
| about who was using Godzilla that week.
|
| Made for great mascot toys and posters on the rack doors.
| wazoox wrote:
| A server can be around for years and years why being
| different. For instance my main debian package server has
| been "basson" since 2003. In 2003 it was a large, old SGI
| server; later on it became a 1U rack server, that was
| replaced a couple of times; nowadays it's a VM. But the
| internal sources.list still points to "basson" :)
|
| (My machines all have musical instrument names).
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Or your robot vacuum cleaner! My nieces have various names - Oni,
| Bob. Ours is named Puck.
| thom wrote:
| For personal stuff (and even early machines for some companies
| which blurred the lines) I always chose the names of forests in
| the Magic: the Gathering multiverse. I try and help keep this
| page updated purely for that purpose:
|
| https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Forest
|
| These days, for work, it's just boring unambiguous stuff. I think
| with more cloud infrastructure and the rarity of shared unix
| servers with home directories for people, it's rare that I have
| any emotional investment in a machine. They're basically soulless
| now.
| Etheryte wrote:
| To date, Dryad Arbor is still one of the coolest cards in MtG,
| simply because of both the simplicity and the universality of
| its quote. When it came out, I was very surprised by the idea
| that a land could also be a creature. These days we have way
| wonkier mechanics, but that novelty along with the quote has a
| special place in my heart.
| thom wrote:
| Yeah I'm always really sad it doesn't make it into the MTGO
| cube.
| bobbyi_settv wrote:
| An opponent being able to remove one of your lands with
| small creature removal or any ping effect or -1/-1 counter
| is scary.
|
| It sees play (I think) in Legacy and Commander where there
| are a bunch of specific powerful ways to abuse it (e.g.,
| combo off early with Arbor + Gaea's Cradle to generate a
| bunch of mana), but you're not going to pull that off often
| in cube, so it would mostly be a basic forest that your
| opponent can easily remove.
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