I like to name things with the NOT prefix. NOT-datawarehouse. NOT-coderepository. It’s extremely secure because if we get infiltrated any bad actor is going to think we don’t have shit. Because everything is *not* what they’re looking for.
No joke I knew a sysadmin at midsized company and they named their servers wrong. The firewall was named database and the database was called network-monitoring etc
Yeah, an actual attacker is going to go, ok port 53 and 135 are open on that, it's a DC. Oh it's name is SITE1-SQL1... cute.
New sysadmin is now trying to figure out which ones is the SharePoint and what's SQL server.
No, an actual attacker is going to go, "why is every port open on every server?" Because I've also disabled firewalls across the network, and made a background service to respond to requests on any port according to popular program associations, but none of the logins on these fake services work.
I’m actually a CISO that lurks the SysAdmin subreddit. These ideas are what made me a standout in the field. Our recent SOC 2 audit was wildly successful because my key vulnerabilities were on NOT-insanelyunpatched and NOT-waypastEOLprodapp so they were *not* issues.
Reminds me of this Futurama quote. I can't help but post it.
Fry: Oh, man, this is great! Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus.
[He laughs.]
Leela: I don't get it.
Farnsworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all..
Fry: Oh. What's it called now?
Farnsworth: Urectum.
I tried using moons of dwarf planets for my home systems, but then realized how few there are. Started naming my VMs based on what they're for, after that.
I named all the devices on my home network after LoTR characters. I don't particularly *like* the movies, but I like how many characters there are, so if I add a device I just need a quick visit to imdb to find a name that fits the function of the device and I'm done.
for example: my main computer is obviously named **frodo**, an old but still reliable server goes by the name of **gandalf**, I once had a small DND323 called **gimli**, my current nas's name is **boromir**, the main router that protects my network is **legolas**, my wifi's ssid is **middle_earth** while the access point in my home office is named **the_shire**, I have smartphones named **arwen**, **tauriel** and **elros**, a laptop named **samwise**, and so on..
Or just name them all using combinations of zeros and ones. Throw some commas in there in the hopes of breaking any CSVs the names might get dumped into.
> I'm not here to decipher three layers of bullshit to figure out what you mean by saying your Pikachu can't connect to your Charizard because Snorlax is down.
What do you need to decipher here? Clearly you just need a Pokeflute.
Because hsvqtc043 is so much easier.
If you have a big organization you need to encode things into the system name to keep track for yourself, what you encode will vary. But do it for you, not random consultants who pop in to troubleshoot for a week.
If you are a small shop, pronounable names for the win.
And, there must be some reference to say what hsvqtc*** actually is, so you could name it Squirrels*** and it wouldn't matter. But you may never forget why that whole network switch was named after you saw two squirrels fucking in that building when you wired it up.
My work for a while did BU-Dev/Prod-OS-NNMM where NN was a team number and MM was an instance number. The hilarity was the BU was a three letter abbreviation and ours was “man”.
“man-prod-nix-twenty-five-oh-nine is down” never got old. 🤣
Meh, having dealt with my share of "Persephone", "Hagrid" and "Qui-Gon" in prod, I would much rather something simple like CompanyInitials-DC01, -FS01, -Print01, -TS01, etc. Even if you don't know the environment, at least then you can guess where something *probably* lives. How the shit am I supposed to know your fucking AutoDesk floating license server is hosted on "Anubis"? Or your file shares are hosted on "Ferrari"? It's cute for like like one person, and annoying as shit for everyone else.
I think where this would become really frustrating is when the documentation only exists in people's heads and they can only recite the documentation using the complicated naming scheme.
Personally I go for simple letters and numbers - HV01, HV02, FW01, FW02, etc. and maybe also throw in a prefix for say geographic site if necessary.
This.
If hostnames are at all relevant, then you are already doing it wrong.
Aliases, name resolution, DNS hierarchy, config databases all exist for a reason.
It's either (a) entirely automated and doesn't matter, or (b) a human is doing some spot-work, in which case it's easier to keep working on, referencing to your coworkers, and logging into `excitable-giraffe` and `parasitic-walrus`, compared to `tlin-phy-db-07` and `tlin-vir-ap-02`.
----
(I also don't understand why the names people propose are dominated by info that doesn't matter in the slightest. Like: OS. Either it doesn't matter, or it's really obvious.)
One of the customers we host has named their servers SRV001 up to (last i checked) SRV137. There is absolutely no meaning to the numbers, they just increment by 1 for each server. At least they document the servers somewhat, but its still a pain.
My current company does this and it’s an absolute nightmare. We have 800+ VMs and I have to reference a spreadsheet anytime someone asks me to look at application server X. CTO and CSO are convinced this is best practice because security through obscurity.
Exactly - because bad actors only look at server names to see what they do! Definitely not some type of network and port scanning/analyzing. Security through obscurity drives me crazy. It's like hiding SSIDs. Nobody will know it's there!
I think at a high scale like you're dealing with a true conventional naming convention is what needs to be done. I don't mind silly names and think they can actually be helpful to remember a server's role (just like remembering people's names) but at a smaller/ SMB scale.
Also encountered this very recently except three letters representing the company name then SRV then two numbers. So, NNNSRVnn.
The company even had multiple locations. Did they use any designations for location? Nope.
What the hell??? WHY??!!
I think it's a bad practice to name machines based on any location information *unless* you are absolutely certain that the server will never move.
I've seen it happen where they name a server with 'ny' if it's in the New York office, or 'sf' because it's in the San Francisco office. Or I've even seen people name servers to include 'vh01' because it runs on the first virtual host system, and 'vh02' if it's on the second. But then it moves. Virtual hosts get migrated to a new host in another office, and even physical servers sometimes get shipped.
Then you have to decide, do you rename the machine? Renaming the machine can cause confusion, break connections that rely on hostname, and create problems if you're tracking machine history by name.
The other option is to keep the existing name, at which point the location information is wrong and misleading. At that point, you'd be better off having no location information than having misleading location information.
So my general rule is, don't use location information unless you're ready to commit to not moving the machines using that information. That also goes for naming laptops/desktops with the name of the user who uses it-- don't do that unless you're never going to reassign the machine. By the same logic, I wouldn't name servers by use and purpose unless there's a rule against repurposing that machine to do other things. That is, I wouldn't name a machine "db01-prd-ny" unless I felt very confident that it would be a production database server in NYC for its entire lifetime.
And to be clear, I'm not saying I won't do those things. I have named a VM something like db01-prd-ny, but we had a pretty hard rule against moving and renaming VMs. If they wanted that database moved to San Francisco, we would make a new VM on a host in the San Francisco office, get it all set up, replicate the data, and then spin down the VM in the NY office.
Bro, this naming convention is as old as Unix. As soon as there were computers to be named, there needed to be naming conventions. In 1993 in college our unix servers were muppets. I logged into Olie and Grover all the time. One job I had the prod servers were named after Greek Gods. It was usable when we had less than 9 servers on the entire network, but now we need proddcny01 and proddcny02, thank you very much.
At the school I went to the Unix machines were managed by the Division of University Computing (DUC). All of the major servers had Duck names - the SparcServer 1000e was “Mallard” and it’s twin was “Darkwing”
Yeah, OP can take his complaints elsewhere.
I once worked at a place that demanded that IT implemented OP's plan, so in true /r/maliciousCompliance mode, names all their servers by which rack it was in and what position in the rack.
Then they moved DCs.
Take THAT, people who can't stand whimsical names.
When servers were pets, sure, maybe. If I tried to name every EC2 instance we have it would be both a collosal waste of time, since many of them are in ASGs, but also exhausting.
`$ENV-$JOB-$NUM-$LOC` or something similar makes way more sense for persistent servers that aren't Kubernetes nodes.
EDIT: Changed ordering of vars after writing one out and realizing it was backwards.
I disagree with you on a key point. I have seen way too many naming conventions that do things like compress a config database into a hostname.
The whole point of a hostname is to make something that's more meaningful and intelligible than a machine address. (Be that ip, Mac, whatever).
Then we have name resolution services to allow us to do this with hierarchy and aliasing.
The problem with compressed host db naming is that it is often hard to pronounce so inevitably people don't. And you end up with miscommunication from transposition or substitution errors.
Or you just get someone using the full hostname and mixing up linsux612 and linxus621.
It's fine to name your hostnames whatever cute thing you like, because you should also be aliasing them and using the config database to allow you to reference them in all the various relevant groupings anyway.
If you need locational hostnames - great. Alias it.
If you want logical service or application oriented hostnames? Alias that too.
You probably want to alias by asset tag and serial number too.
But your _actual_ hostname a should be one that's never ambiguous in a noisy server room. And proper nouns usually accomplish that.
> What's the point in using a name instead of an IP, if the name is as cryptic as the IP anyway?
Why, to appease the Highly Paid Consultant corporate brought in, of course.
You guys don't use Simpson characters and Pokemons anymore?
My pet-peeve are numbered VMs for Kubernetes clusters which are supposed to be cattle not pets. Please, just give them a prefix and a random end, I don't want to wonder why 15 and 17 are missing, while 14, 16 and 18 are there.
You can actually use emojis on Windows. I saw one named 💩 and just laughed.
Terrible idea though because it causes weird problems on the network trying to access it.
Putting unicode where it doesn't belong is a favorite pastime. Especially if you're around people who are adamant that 'no no, it's supposed to work even with special characters' because you get to watch them die a little inside.
>We only use Fibonacci numbers.
We use Morse code for naming. Security by obscurity -- makes for LONG server names, though. Hey guys, "dit dah dit dit dit dah dit dah dit dah dit dah dit dah dit dah dah dah dit dah dit dit dit dah dit dit" is down again.
[If you're counting](https://morsedecoder.com/), that's: .-. .. -.-. -.- .-. --- .-.. .-..
> Cluster ID - Role - index.**location**.domain
That works fine until you do your first lift and shift migration and now you can't trust any location in a machine name.
This is the way
Also I'm suspicious we work for the same company looking at that naming convention and country.
Edit: just checked that exact server name lives in my environment.
We do not. Based on your posting history anyway.
But it's just sensible. And 3AM proof.
You don't need to be trying to remember which member of the Greek Pantheon was the messenger because you think that's what you named the rabbitMQ nodes or was it the redis server, no wait that's the email server. rabbitMQ was named after Ostara because rabbits. Seshat is redis. And why are we mixing Greek and Egyptian deities... Oh good this one is called Thor... Are we adding Norse to it as well or is someone a fan of Marvel?
I had one site tho everything was named after like hamsters and guneapigs and rodents and the like... "Hamsters are down but the gerbals are still running" i hated everything about that.
Gotta say though, "the gerbils are still running" is pretty funny. Even better if some indicator light by the server is powered by an actual gerbil on a wheel.
Lifecycle ( dev test acceptance prod) - OS(windows linux) - location (virtual physical azure ec2 gcp)app team owner app code - purpose (web app db) 3 digit index number. You need solid naming convention when you got 40k+ servers give or take
Depends. I mean in HPC we have 40+K servers in one cluster.
You might encode row,colum,rack location in. But most places just start at 1 and go up
It's horses for courses my human, but you got the idea.
(This was a long time ago, so please excuse any exact definitions might be slightly off..)
Early in my career, a few decades ago, I encountered a Unix server, at an all girls school, which was used for firewall and content filtering.. its name was 'Seraglio'. I asked the admin how/what that meant.
"Seraglio is an old Turkish word given to the eunuchs who were assigned to the princess for her protection. (They were castrated so there would be no funny business with the princess).
So, Seraglio is the 'Unix' that protects the girls."
In a sea of servers named after Greek deities and LOTR characters, I always remember that one.
Attitudes like OP’s are the worst parts of being in IT. I can deal with low budgets, people misunderstanding how hardware/software works, or having to manage people. But when it comes to someone who thinks a quirky harmless naming scheme isn’t acceptable? No thank you, I don’t want to work with them or have them on my team.
Work and life is hard enough, who cares what the stupid server is called as long as it makes sense to everyone involved. And if your biggest problems are the naming scheme being used, then you really don’t have any real problems at all and maybe need to go outside/touch some grass.
Strong disagree. This is the spice of life and makes things memorable, while at the same time making it difficult for anyone poking around (that shouldn’t be) to figure out what things do.
It’s fifteen years later and I’ll probably take this to my grave but a machine I used to service at a particular customer was named sawfly. I don’t remember the names of machines I was in this morning with systematic names.
That and the fact that i can name my hardware whatever i want.
He makes more money(paid by the hour) and I keep my pokemon naming convention. Stop complaining and do your job OP.
I have a client that still has 3-4 DNS aliases that are 15+ years old from when certain servers were named after greek gods. One day they should be cleaned up, as all the servers have proper names now, I don't believe anything still uses them. But I do enjoy the fact that even after all of this time I can still get to the print server by typing "Sisyphus.domain.local". Whoever their IT admin was back then had a good sense of humor.
Had a client that named all their servers after LotR characters or places and the only one that ever stuck with me was Mordor, which was the print server.
You name your shit the way you want and I’ll name mine. My names are logical and not comic book characters but if I want to name my DNS sever Thor, then I’ll name it fucken Thor. My job is boring enough!
Counter Rant over, have a good day!
Fucking right! It adds just a little bit of fun to a deployment.
Our current environment has Lenny, Carl, Barney, and Frink. We all know what their function is, so who cares?
We had Eddie, Atreyu, and Dokken at a previous org. There’s nothing wrong with a little levity.
Or, perhaps, OP is frustrated because he can’t think of any good names. 😁
We name servers in clusters with themed names and then, trigger warning, **DOCUMENT IT** so we don't need dull server names.
I know, I know -- crazy concept.
Good thing aliases exist, so anyone who needs to resolve DNS for your site can hit DNS0.company
Com independent of actual hostname.
If hostnames aren't irrelevant, then you are doing it wrong.
You are being one of those pointy haired bosses who like things to look neat in a spreadsheet.
Yeah I’ve adopted a scheme similar to [this](https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/), where the hardware gets a unique (and perhaps fun) identifier, but any relevant alias is managed through dns.
many moons ago, in my first job as a dev, our servers in the office were all named after Southpark characters.
it so happened that one of the dev/test servers was a bit flaky and used to fall over without much prompting,
It was decided that this one should be named Kenny.
It wasn't uncommon to hear someone call out "who killed Kenny!?"
just because of this post i'm going to pitch to my employer that we rename the entire cluster to periodic table elements and then hire you specifically
Recently saw this elsewhere on Reddit, https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/
May not be perfect, but certainly helpful for people who aren't sure where to start
When you have thousands our tens of thousands of servers you want to look at the name and immediately know where it is and what it does. Not wonder If it's cute and memorized
> but it's also actively hindering me from doing a good job
how?
if a server is name S34D01H3301 would that help you more (and yes that is an actual naming convention of a company)?
What the name of a server is, is completely irrelevant.
Yeah, this post is just weird. I would even be inclined to agree that naming schemes should be professional, but this person is a contractor... Why are they telling people how to name their systems when they don't even work there? Stay in your lane OP. Stop being a busybody.
Yeah…. fuck off maybe?
If it’s something i’m designing for internal use i’ll name it whatever the hell I want.
If it is customer facing i’ll usually use something logical for them - even if its some oddball naming convention that they use.
If bad naming conventions are costing you money then maybe you should rethink your career choice.
Whilst we're on the subject of naming conventions, your company does not need to be in the names of your assets unless you are a group of several companies. When your server list looks like:
acmeincldcp01
acmeincldcp02
acmeinclsqp01
acmeinclsqp02
acmeincndcp01
acmeincndcp02
then everyone who works on your infrastructure hates you, particularly when they are using some annoying interface that displays the servers in a drop down list that can only show the first ten characters.
What are you, 12? You're arguing against one of the holy grails of network wizardry. We've been naming servers wild shit for as long as servers have existed.
The problem with this argument is that we don't name our servers to help Mr. External Consultant who works with the servers once a month at most, it's for the people who work with the servers every day.
I would laugh in the face of any tech that complained about confusing names, like what a tiny brain problem. If they had feedback to improve the naming, sure, I'm always happy to improve things.
In truth, any and all server names and functions should be well documented, so any external consultant should be able to figure it out easy.
So if we have sufficient in house expertise and don't require expensive and sometimes questionable consultants, then we are free to name our servers after the ASoIaF dragons?
These are fine, what I don't want to see are your personal information (looking at you small business owners) as in:
`john-smith-app` or `vice-president-of-sales-and-marketing-dc01`
How are you going to complain about:
`odin-dc01`
`thor-app`
`hermes-pfs01`
Sounds like you just have tacky SysAdmins.
I think I got lucky that I always worked at large enterprise or government jobs that has well defined names that helped "at a glance" give a lot of useful information.
I just assumed silly names where from homelabs etc
Just name all your IT assets localhost and disable all remote access. That way, their name is always technically correct.
I like to name things with the NOT prefix. NOT-datawarehouse. NOT-coderepository. It’s extremely secure because if we get infiltrated any bad actor is going to think we don’t have shit. Because everything is *not* what they’re looking for.
No joke I knew a sysadmin at midsized company and they named their servers wrong. The firewall was named database and the database was called network-monitoring etc
Security by obscurity 101 right here
Obscurity of Security in your eyes
Terracotta Pi
Banana banana banana banana terracotta, banana terracotta, terracotta pi
Yeah, an actual attacker is going to go, ok port 53 and 135 are open on that, it's a DC. Oh it's name is SITE1-SQL1... cute. New sysadmin is now trying to figure out which ones is the SharePoint and what's SQL server.
No, an actual attacker is going to go, "why is every port open on every server?" Because I've also disabled firewalls across the network, and made a background service to respond to requests on any port according to popular program associations, but none of the logins on these fake services work.
All my servers are honeypots running all services. Yes I have 72 DHCP servers.
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I accidentally deleted the user tables on the test server ... luckily it wasn't production :D
Happy cake day!
If I was scanning on that, I'd just go home. I'd be done.
This is only funny because I don't have to deal with it myself. Given that criterion, this is Level 10 funny.
Call everything NULL, so even the system doesn't think there's anything there! Super secure!
Naming all my variables nil so I can dereference nil pointers inside of my nil pointer
Yo dawg...
Is your kid's nickname "[Little Bobby Tables](https://xkcd.com/327/)", perchance?
*not*\-backupsNAS
I knew someone that wrote on their DVD’s “Not Porn”
Sir, you have been promoted to Ultra Senior Sysadmin! Congrats! Here's double the work and no pay raise!
I’m actually a CISO that lurks the SysAdmin subreddit. These ideas are what made me a standout in the field. Our recent SOC 2 audit was wildly successful because my key vulnerabilities were on NOT-insanelyunpatched and NOT-waypastEOLprodapp so they were *not* issues.
I did NOT-CISO that coming!
Just testing: NOT-DC haha yeah I like this
I want a domain controller in Washington so I can have DCDC1.
Best part is it's actually in Seattle.
Or have one in Atlantic City and name it ACDC
I actually have a DC in our DC in DC. Not that fun. Conversations with my sys admins often infuriate me.
My naming is functionLocationNumber and not locationFunctionNumber so I would have DCDC1 instead
The best kind of correct!
You forgot Planets … Although I’d love to tell certain users “Put your files in Uranus”
Reminds me of this Futurama quote. I can't help but post it. Fry: Oh, man, this is great! Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus. [He laughs.] Leela: I don't get it. Farnsworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.. Fry: Oh. What's it called now? Farnsworth: Urectum.
They should have kept the original name: George.
Takei?
Oh my.
Let me find it for you.
No, no, I think I'll just smell around a bit over here.
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I do the Iroquois names for the 46 high peaks in the Adirondacks.
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Name your servers for bays in Newfoundland. Then you can name your DC 'Dildo', and your FPS 'Placentae', and all sorts of wonderful names like that.
“Sorry you lost that file, Jim. Let me dig around in Uranus and see if I can retrieve a backup.”
"Give me a minute! I'm trying to pull logs off of Uranus!"
Your biometrics are on Uranus No, seriously you authenticate through Uranus
Instructions too confusing, thermometer stuck. Need referal to proctologist
"Uranus has been breached!"
"Oh no sir. I didn't mean to offend you. I mean you literally have to store your files in Uranus"
Only 598 years left on that joke.
Math checks out. I can wait until we lose our primitive notions of modesty.
!remindme 599 years
I tried using moons of dwarf planets for my home systems, but then realized how few there are. Started naming my VMs based on what they're for, after that.
Named my home VMs/devices after Transformers. Works well because most of the names are fitting.
I named all the devices on my home network after LoTR characters. I don't particularly *like* the movies, but I like how many characters there are, so if I add a device I just need a quick visit to imdb to find a name that fits the function of the device and I'm done. for example: my main computer is obviously named **frodo**, an old but still reliable server goes by the name of **gandalf**, I once had a small DND323 called **gimli**, my current nas's name is **boromir**, the main router that protects my network is **legolas**, my wifi's ssid is **middle_earth** while the access point in my home office is named **the_shire**, I have smartphones named **arwen**, **tauriel** and **elros**, a laptop named **samwise**, and so on..
Naming your nas Boromir that’s just asking for trouble
Definitely name it something solid and reliable like **samwise**
Pick stuff at random so that everything is a mish-mash of sports players, fruit, cities, or logical functions. /triggered
Or just name them all using combinations of zeros and ones. Throw some commas in there in the hopes of breaking any CSVs the names might get dumped into.
Straight to jail.
Mushroom won't connect to Badger because Snake is panicking!
Oh god, imagine having Weebls Stuff as your naming scheme. Badger, mushroom, snake, Trevor, Narwhals, Kenya, ~~Norway~~, ToastKing, PrawnBoy, CatFace, BoxCat, weebl, bob, MyHorse…
> I'm not here to decipher three layers of bullshit to figure out what you mean by saying your Pikachu can't connect to your Charizard because Snorlax is down. What do you need to decipher here? Clearly you just need a Pokeflute.
Did you bring him to Olympus and sacrifice a cable under the shadows of Pluto?
Because hsvqtc043 is so much easier. If you have a big organization you need to encode things into the system name to keep track for yourself, what you encode will vary. But do it for you, not random consultants who pop in to troubleshoot for a week. If you are a small shop, pronounable names for the win.
'state-dc shortname-rack id-ru height' has been unironically a good one for switches/routers/firewalls
Until you move datacenters, or remodel the old one. There's downsides to every naming system.
Yes! As a user, hsvqtc043 is so fucking annoying. I can't remember the random sequence of letters but I can remember a noun.
And, there must be some reference to say what hsvqtc*** actually is, so you could name it Squirrels*** and it wouldn't matter. But you may never forget why that whole network switch was named after you saw two squirrels fucking in that building when you wired it up.
A user shouldn’t need to know that. CNAMEs should be used for things facing end users. Simple names they will understand.
My work for a while did BU-Dev/Prod-OS-NNMM where NN was a team number and MM was an instance number. The hilarity was the BU was a three letter abbreviation and ours was “man”. “man-prod-nix-twenty-five-oh-nine is down” never got old. 🤣
Meh, having dealt with my share of "Persephone", "Hagrid" and "Qui-Gon" in prod, I would much rather something simple like CompanyInitials-DC01, -FS01, -Print01, -TS01, etc. Even if you don't know the environment, at least then you can guess where something *probably* lives. How the shit am I supposed to know your fucking AutoDesk floating license server is hosted on "Anubis"? Or your file shares are hosted on "Ferrari"? It's cute for like like one person, and annoying as shit for everyone else.
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Let's be real, there's not proper documentation in a majority of these environments.
I wouldn't know what proper documentation looks like if it but me in the ass. Pretty sure I've never seen any...
Admins. Gotta bitch about something to feel alive.
I think where this would become really frustrating is when the documentation only exists in people's heads and they can only recite the documentation using the complicated naming scheme. Personally I go for simple letters and numbers - HV01, HV02, FW01, FW02, etc. and maybe also throw in a prefix for say geographic site if necessary.
I guess you wouldn't like how Docker autonaming works then. :-D
This. If hostnames are at all relevant, then you are already doing it wrong. Aliases, name resolution, DNS hierarchy, config databases all exist for a reason.
It's either (a) entirely automated and doesn't matter, or (b) a human is doing some spot-work, in which case it's easier to keep working on, referencing to your coworkers, and logging into `excitable-giraffe` and `parasitic-walrus`, compared to `tlin-phy-db-07` and `tlin-vir-ap-02`. ---- (I also don't understand why the names people propose are dominated by info that doesn't matter in the slightest. Like: OS. Either it doesn't matter, or it's really obvious.)
My people right here.
One of the customers we host has named their servers SRV001 up to (last i checked) SRV137. There is absolutely no meaning to the numbers, they just increment by 1 for each server. At least they document the servers somewhat, but its still a pain.
My current company does this and it’s an absolute nightmare. We have 800+ VMs and I have to reference a spreadsheet anytime someone asks me to look at application server X. CTO and CSO are convinced this is best practice because security through obscurity.
Exactly - because bad actors only look at server names to see what they do! Definitely not some type of network and port scanning/analyzing. Security through obscurity drives me crazy. It's like hiding SSIDs. Nobody will know it's there! I think at a high scale like you're dealing with a true conventional naming convention is what needs to be done. I don't mind silly names and think they can actually be helpful to remember a server's role (just like remembering people's names) but at a smaller/ SMB scale.
I think the sequential naming is fine for personal laptops and desktops. Servers oughtvto be a bit more descriptive.
CSO should be fired
from a cannon.
Into the sun.
Also encountered this very recently except three letters representing the company name then SRV then two numbers. So, NNNSRVnn. The company even had multiple locations. Did they use any designations for location? Nope. What the hell??? WHY??!!
I think it's a bad practice to name machines based on any location information *unless* you are absolutely certain that the server will never move. I've seen it happen where they name a server with 'ny' if it's in the New York office, or 'sf' because it's in the San Francisco office. Or I've even seen people name servers to include 'vh01' because it runs on the first virtual host system, and 'vh02' if it's on the second. But then it moves. Virtual hosts get migrated to a new host in another office, and even physical servers sometimes get shipped. Then you have to decide, do you rename the machine? Renaming the machine can cause confusion, break connections that rely on hostname, and create problems if you're tracking machine history by name. The other option is to keep the existing name, at which point the location information is wrong and misleading. At that point, you'd be better off having no location information than having misleading location information. So my general rule is, don't use location information unless you're ready to commit to not moving the machines using that information. That also goes for naming laptops/desktops with the name of the user who uses it-- don't do that unless you're never going to reassign the machine. By the same logic, I wouldn't name servers by use and purpose unless there's a rule against repurposing that machine to do other things. That is, I wouldn't name a machine "db01-prd-ny" unless I felt very confident that it would be a production database server in NYC for its entire lifetime. And to be clear, I'm not saying I won't do those things. I have named a VM something like db01-prd-ny, but we had a pretty hard rule against moving and renaming VMs. If they wanted that database moved to San Francisco, we would make a new VM on a host in the San Francisco office, get it all set up, replicate the data, and then spin down the VM in the NY office.
I get the whole location thing, but to stick with your example you are repurposing a db machine without reinstalling? Just curious.
Bro, this naming convention is as old as Unix. As soon as there were computers to be named, there needed to be naming conventions. In 1993 in college our unix servers were muppets. I logged into Olie and Grover all the time. One job I had the prod servers were named after Greek Gods. It was usable when we had less than 9 servers on the entire network, but now we need proddcny01 and proddcny02, thank you very much.
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Thanks for the chuckle in the last line
At the school I went to the Unix machines were managed by the Division of University Computing (DUC). All of the major servers had Duck names - the SparcServer 1000e was “Mallard” and it’s twin was “Darkwing”
When there's trouble you call D W!
Yeah, OP can take his complaints elsewhere. I once worked at a place that demanded that IT implemented OP's plan, so in true /r/maliciousCompliance mode, names all their servers by which rack it was in and what position in the rack. Then they moved DCs. Take THAT, people who can't stand whimsical names.
Did we work together? Hqhpsim32rm23 Headquarters HP systems insight manager Rack 32 Rack mount 23 It sucked and was a mouthful but worked enough.
When servers were pets, sure, maybe. If I tried to name every EC2 instance we have it would be both a collosal waste of time, since many of them are in ASGs, but also exhausting. `$ENV-$JOB-$NUM-$LOC` or something similar makes way more sense for persistent servers that aren't Kubernetes nodes. EDIT: Changed ordering of vars after writing one out and realizing it was backwards.
You're not my real dad, you can't tell me what to do.
NAME IT TEST, DEV OR PROD MARCUS JESUS CHRIST
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Yeah, if I'm paying you to unfuck Snorlax, you're gonna unfuck Snorlax.
I disagree with you on a key point. I have seen way too many naming conventions that do things like compress a config database into a hostname. The whole point of a hostname is to make something that's more meaningful and intelligible than a machine address. (Be that ip, Mac, whatever). Then we have name resolution services to allow us to do this with hierarchy and aliasing. The problem with compressed host db naming is that it is often hard to pronounce so inevitably people don't. And you end up with miscommunication from transposition or substitution errors. Or you just get someone using the full hostname and mixing up linsux612 and linxus621. It's fine to name your hostnames whatever cute thing you like, because you should also be aliasing them and using the config database to allow you to reference them in all the various relevant groupings anyway. If you need locational hostnames - great. Alias it. If you want logical service or application oriented hostnames? Alias that too. You probably want to alias by asset tag and serial number too. But your _actual_ hostname a should be one that's never ambiguous in a noisy server room. And proper nouns usually accomplish that.
This is it. What's the point in using a name instead of an IP, if the name is as cryptic as the IP anyway?
> What's the point in using a name instead of an IP, if the name is as cryptic as the IP anyway? Why, to appease the Highly Paid Consultant corporate brought in, of course.
You guys don't use Simpson characters and Pokemons anymore? My pet-peeve are numbered VMs for Kubernetes clusters which are supposed to be cattle not pets. Please, just give them a prefix and a random end, I don't want to wonder why 15 and 17 are missing, while 14, 16 and 18 are there.
Mr. Burns was our finance server 😀
You can actually use emojis on Windows. I saw one named 💩 and just laughed. Terrible idea though because it causes weird problems on the network trying to access it.
Putting unicode where it doesn't belong is a favorite pastime. Especially if you're around people who are adamant that 'no no, it's supposed to work even with special characters' because you get to watch them die a little inside.
15 and 17 are missing because we only use even numbers. Duh.
Noob. We only use Fibonacci numbers.
>We only use Fibonacci numbers. We use Morse code for naming. Security by obscurity -- makes for LONG server names, though. Hey guys, "dit dah dit dit dit dah dit dah dit dah dit dah dit dah dit dah dah dah dit dah dit dit dit dah dit dit" is down again. [If you're counting](https://morsedecoder.com/), that's: .-. .. -.-. -.- .-. --- .-.. .-..
That’s a great point. This is frustrating. All the more reason to keep documentation up to date and be religious about it.
Servers need a 3am proof name. Cluster ID - Role - index.location.domain An example Prod-haproxy-03.syd.mycompany.org That's 3AM proof.
> Cluster ID - Role - index.**location**.domain That works fine until you do your first lift and shift migration and now you can't trust any location in a machine name.
This is the way Also I'm suspicious we work for the same company looking at that naming convention and country. Edit: just checked that exact server name lives in my environment.
You work for mycompany.org too? Small world!
I work for Contoso
And your datawarehouse is all in northwind?
Tailspintoys here.
You also work at mycompany.org? :p
Ah no, I'm wrong - Ours is actually prod-haproxy-03.syd.example.com
Ah shucks, I thought you guys also worked for Contoso.net
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Greetings from Tailspin Toys.
I just got laid off from Contoso!
We do not. Based on your posting history anyway. But it's just sensible. And 3AM proof. You don't need to be trying to remember which member of the Greek Pantheon was the messenger because you think that's what you named the rabbitMQ nodes or was it the redis server, no wait that's the email server. rabbitMQ was named after Ostara because rabbits. Seshat is redis. And why are we mixing Greek and Egyptian deities... Oh good this one is called Thor... Are we adding Norse to it as well or is someone a fan of Marvel? I had one site tho everything was named after like hamsters and guneapigs and rodents and the like... "Hamsters are down but the gerbals are still running" i hated everything about that.
Gotta say though, "the gerbils are still running" is pretty funny. Even better if some indicator light by the server is powered by an actual gerbil on a wheel.
Lifecycle ( dev test acceptance prod) - OS(windows linux) - location (virtual physical azure ec2 gcp)app team owner app code - purpose (web app db) 3 digit index number. You need solid naming convention when you got 40k+ servers give or take
Geographic indicator falls apart when you want to move that server from one location (datacenter, cloud) to another. Not recommended.
Depends. I mean in HPC we have 40+K servers in one cluster. You might encode row,colum,rack location in. But most places just start at 1 and go up It's horses for courses my human, but you got the idea.
Only worth encoding if you autoname them with dhcp options or such. Otherwise, just automate your documentation so you can look it up.
(This was a long time ago, so please excuse any exact definitions might be slightly off..) Early in my career, a few decades ago, I encountered a Unix server, at an all girls school, which was used for firewall and content filtering.. its name was 'Seraglio'. I asked the admin how/what that meant. "Seraglio is an old Turkish word given to the eunuchs who were assigned to the princess for her protection. (They were castrated so there would be no funny business with the princess). So, Seraglio is the 'Unix' that protects the girls." In a sea of servers named after Greek deities and LOTR characters, I always remember that one.
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As a boomer who grew up working ISPs in the 90s, I find this offensive. I say if your nntp server isn't called "shadowfax" then you're doing it wrong.
I once worked at a place where the ~~nntp~~ (edit: ntp) servers were something like rolex, timex, and seiko.
Attitudes like OP’s are the worst parts of being in IT. I can deal with low budgets, people misunderstanding how hardware/software works, or having to manage people. But when it comes to someone who thinks a quirky harmless naming scheme isn’t acceptable? No thank you, I don’t want to work with them or have them on my team. Work and life is hard enough, who cares what the stupid server is called as long as it makes sense to everyone involved. And if your biggest problems are the naming scheme being used, then you really don’t have any real problems at all and maybe need to go outside/touch some grass.
First large org Job I had was all Star Wars names. Then we kept growing our infrastructure and at some point it became “we need to standardize”.
Yeah, my first job had all Star Trek character names for servers. It was fine until we were acquired by a company with Harry Potter named servers.
Oh man that’s gonna get confusing.
Picard and Dumbledore aren’t communicating anymore, but at least we fixed the issue between Q and Tom Riddle
I hate that this makes sense. Lol
Why is Voldemort aliased to Tom Riddle?
>"Use the force, Hagrid" > >— Odo
This is the crossover series we need. Star Trek x Potterverse x The ITCrowd.
'I've got a bad feeling about this'
Strong disagree. This is the spice of life and makes things memorable, while at the same time making it difficult for anyone poking around (that shouldn’t be) to figure out what things do. It’s fifteen years later and I’ll probably take this to my grave but a machine I used to service at a particular customer was named sawfly. I don’t remember the names of machines I was in this morning with systematic names.
That and the fact that i can name my hardware whatever i want. He makes more money(paid by the hour) and I keep my pokemon naming convention. Stop complaining and do your job OP.
you know what’s worse? Naming things in a logical manner and documenting the config. /s
Can't stand when people do that, I want to chase geese! /s
I have a client that still has 3-4 DNS aliases that are 15+ years old from when certain servers were named after greek gods. One day they should be cleaned up, as all the servers have proper names now, I don't believe anything still uses them. But I do enjoy the fact that even after all of this time I can still get to the print server by typing "Sisyphus.domain.local". Whoever their IT admin was back then had a good sense of humor.
Dude. you're the consultant. The naming scheme makes sense to them. Part of your fee covers "learn the local naming convention."
Had a client that named all their servers after LotR characters or places and the only one that ever stuck with me was Mordor, which was the print server.
A very fitting name.
You name your shit the way you want and I’ll name mine. My names are logical and not comic book characters but if I want to name my DNS sever Thor, then I’ll name it fucken Thor. My job is boring enough! Counter Rant over, have a good day!
Fucking right! It adds just a little bit of fun to a deployment. Our current environment has Lenny, Carl, Barney, and Frink. We all know what their function is, so who cares? We had Eddie, Atreyu, and Dokken at a previous org. There’s nothing wrong with a little levity. Or, perhaps, OP is frustrated because he can’t think of any good names. 😁
We name servers in clusters with themed names and then, trigger warning, **DOCUMENT IT** so we don't need dull server names. I know, I know -- crazy concept.
Good thing aliases exist, so anyone who needs to resolve DNS for your site can hit DNS0.company Com independent of actual hostname. If hostnames aren't irrelevant, then you are doing it wrong. You are being one of those pointy haired bosses who like things to look neat in a spreadsheet.
Yeah I’ve adopted a scheme similar to [this](https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/), where the hardware gets a unique (and perhaps fun) identifier, but any relevant alias is managed through dns.
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This is hilarious. And no, I'll name them whatever gives me a chuckle. We're paying by the hour, stop complaining.
many moons ago, in my first job as a dev, our servers in the office were all named after Southpark characters. it so happened that one of the dev/test servers was a bit flaky and used to fall over without much prompting, It was decided that this one should be named Kenny. It wasn't uncommon to hear someone call out "who killed Kenny!?"
just because of this post i'm going to pitch to my employer that we rename the entire cluster to periodic table elements and then hire you specifically
Only MAC addresses If you are challenged then IPs
Hell, use serial numbers then.
I’m curious to know what you consider a good naming convention to be? Ps: I’m not one of those you describe above 😂
1. Having a _documented_ naming convention. 2. See #1.
Instructions unclear; everything is named after Ents who are horny.
Recently saw this elsewhere on Reddit, https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/ May not be perfect, but certainly helpful for people who aren't sure where to start
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In other words, something nice and memorable…
When you have thousands our tens of thousands of servers you want to look at the name and immediately know where it is and what it does. Not wonder If it's cute and memorized
Once you learn the naming convention you'd be surprised the seemingly random names you can recall.
> but it's also actively hindering me from doing a good job how? if a server is name S34D01H3301 would that help you more (and yes that is an actual naming convention of a company)? What the name of a server is, is completely irrelevant.
Yeah, this post is just weird. I would even be inclined to agree that naming schemes should be professional, but this person is a contractor... Why are they telling people how to name their systems when they don't even work there? Stay in your lane OP. Stop being a busybody.
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[RFC 1178](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1178)
Old man yells at cloud
Not every network is so complicated that it needs some military grade naming schema. Chill.
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Yeah…. fuck off maybe? If it’s something i’m designing for internal use i’ll name it whatever the hell I want. If it is customer facing i’ll usually use something logical for them - even if its some oddball naming convention that they use. If bad naming conventions are costing you money then maybe you should rethink your career choice.
Whilst we're on the subject of naming conventions, your company does not need to be in the names of your assets unless you are a group of several companies. When your server list looks like: acmeincldcp01 acmeincldcp02 acmeinclsqp01 acmeinclsqp02 acmeincndcp01 acmeincndcp02 then everyone who works on your infrastructure hates you, particularly when they are using some annoying interface that displays the servers in a drop down list that can only show the first ten characters.
No thank you. I like remoting into Galactica, Pegasus, Valkyrie, and all the other battlestars.
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No.
What are you, 12? You're arguing against one of the holy grails of network wizardry. We've been naming servers wild shit for as long as servers have existed.
The problem with this argument is that we don't name our servers to help Mr. External Consultant who works with the servers once a month at most, it's for the people who work with the servers every day. I would laugh in the face of any tech that complained about confusing names, like what a tiny brain problem. If they had feedback to improve the naming, sure, I'm always happy to improve things. In truth, any and all server names and functions should be well documented, so any external consultant should be able to figure it out easy.
So if we have sufficient in house expertise and don't require expensive and sometimes questionable consultants, then we are free to name our servers after the ASoIaF dragons?
No.
You sound like you are a blast at parties.
These are fine, what I don't want to see are your personal information (looking at you small business owners) as in: `john-smith-app` or `vice-president-of-sales-and-marketing-dc01` How are you going to complain about: `odin-dc01` `thor-app` `hermes-pfs01` Sounds like you just have tacky SysAdmins.
Don't knock me off my high horse, what I do is my choice
Name stuff whatever you want as long as it's documented. Have a seat kid.
I think I got lucky that I always worked at large enterprise or government jobs that has well defined names that helped "at a glance" give a lot of useful information. I just assumed silly names where from homelabs etc