I’ve ended up with a number of machines on my network, and a need to name them all in a somewhat logical way. For several years I had them named after the planets, which worked well until the PCs for myself, my girlfriend, servers and Raspberry Pi’s quickly summed up to more than the eight planets. I’ve broadened it somewhat to include any Greek/Roman mythological figure, but the system is definitely not as clean as it used to be.
Do you have a coordinated naming theme for your machines?
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do birds fly? do ducks duck?
Personally I use corporate-like naming scheme for my devices, the format is:
[AABB-CCCC-DDEE]
AA: Location of the device - HQ (home), CL (cloud).
BB: Role of the device - HV (hypervisor), SV (server), NW (network) and workstation (WS).
CCCC: Device brand (for NW), application running (for SV), and workstation purpose (for WS).
DD: For server and workstation - OS running on the device (WN=Windows, LX=Linux, MA=macOS). For network device - their role on network (RT=router, AP=access point, SW=switch).
EE: # of the device, year of purchase for WS.For example, here’s my router, KASM server and my gaming PC hostnames:
HQNW-UBNT-RT01 HQSV-KASM-LX01 HQWS-GAME-WN16Still trying to optimize this naming scheme, like removing all the dash, but currently too lazy to do it lol.
Because I’m a huge dork, all my machines are named after the FFXIV jobs:
Desktop-Red Mage Laptop-Machinist RaspberryPi-Sage etc.
My server is named Yggdrasil and my devices are named after the 9 realms.
I name my machines after my cats.
Ungulates. Because who doesn’t like a hoofed animal?
My client machines are even-toed ungulates (order Artiodactyla) and my servers/IoT machines are odd-toed (order Perissodactyla). I’m typing this on Gazelle. My router is called Quagga, both after the extinct zebra subspecies and the routing protocol software (I don’t use it any more but hey, it’s a router).
Biological taxonomy is a great source of a huge number of systematic (and colloquial) names.
Every machine is named after what it does (although I do 1337-ify the names, because I’m still a late 90s IRC teen at heart). If you’ve ever been onboarded into a sysadmin role where all the machines are named with whatever whimsical naming scheme each department chose, you’ll fast develop a visceral hatred for non-descriptive naming schemes. The fifth time you get a ticket saying something like ‘Hedwig is down’ and you have to go crawling through three layers of linked files on SharePoint to find what and where ‘Hedwig’ is, you’ll be ready to beat the person who named it to death, and that attitude tends to persist to your home naming scheme :p
The fifth time you get a ticket saying something like ‘Hedwig is down’
If only there was an excellent database to store where Hedwig.bthl4.sea.wa.goliath.corp was and maybe include an alias so you know it’s NNTP5.goliath.corp also.
I shall invent one. It shall replicated and synchronize quickly. It shall interface and accept changes and share data. It will be simple to query so everyone can use it. I shall call it DNS . If people get snippy, I shall next invent an HS record.
Learn to use the tools, man. It’ll help you adhere to a 40-year-old RFC on naming things.
Yes, if you’ve built the network from scratch that works. Retrofitting it into an existing network however is a massive piece of work when you don’t have that single source of truth to start with however. On networks I’ve built sensibly, I’ll happily give people whatever CNAME they want to refer to their machine, but the machines actual name is descriptive, not the other way round.
Rfc1178 be damned.
I’ll get right on rearchitecting the dns infrastructure of a large sprawling corporation, with mountains of technical debt from decades of acquisitions where they just mashed shit together. I’m sure that project will get approved.
Don’t be condescending, man.
Well I’m glad you know it’s there!
I can’t comment on your particular technical debt, as I’m not very psychic. I like how you say not to be condescending and require me to be psychic. That’s cool, but I bet you’re stressed.
Have a good week.
I’m incredibly boring. I name them with the company/model name. And what role they have appended.
Cute naming schemes are for people who don’t have lots of servers. At my work we have over 700 servers. We’re not naming them after something arbitrary, we’re being descriptive.
