The Coolest Server Names - Recently undeleted | Hacker News Reader

The Coolest Server Names - Recently undeleted

serverfault.com

16 pointsakent21 comments

The people who argue against naming machines in an automated fashion don't have hundreds or thousands to manage.

We do something simple: class of machine + number . city.

  m1.sjc1 == generic machine in san jose
  m2.sjc1 == another generic machine in san jose
  db1.ams1 == database class machine in amsterdam
  ops1.chi1 == ops class machine in chicago

Very scalable and easy to manage. Custom names are annoying. Your machine management system can tell you what function they serve.

The people who argue against naming machines in an automated fashion don't have hundreds or thousands to manage.

The people who argue that their use case -- regardless of whether it's ten machines or ten thousand machines -- can be generalized into something everyone has to do are the people I try to avoid arguing with.

Right, which is why I didn't do that (unlike the entire point of the URL in the OP, which does that).

I just said that those groups of people don't have hundreds or thousands of machines to manage if they can maintain a custom naming scheme. I didn't say everyone has to do that. All my personal servers are few-lettered women's names. Laura, Amy, Mary, Sara, Christy, etc. To each, their own.

So please don't troll for karma. Especially on Christmas. Especially on HN.

Or maybe I misunderstood your point as being some snippy remark, in which case, sorry.

A few years ago a co-worker and I built a system for integrating our company's statements with the post office's online bill payment system. I picked "Brownlee" and "Harris" for the server names after two postal workers that... went postal.

The names stuck for a while until someone high up asked what the names meant. I had to change the names after that :(

At home I use star names (from the sky):

  * deneb
  * vega
  * betelgeuse
  * nashira
  * procyon

At work, for simple networks, I use the name of the function the server implements:

  * mail
  * fw (firewall)
  * fs (file server)
  * intranet
  * backup
  * virt (eg. ESXi vCenter)

I don't understand people who insist on appending a 001 postfix to every server name. Firstly, you will most likely never have hundreds of servers fulfilling the same function. Secondly, if you do you will 3 digits may not even be sufficient. So just start with mail, mail2, ... mail10, ... You have files named after servers and "ls" don't show them in numerical order? Use "ls -v". Your management tool don't sort them? Big deal. It's much more painful to have to type "001" the hundreds/thousands of time you will need to ping a server or ssh into it.

Depends on who you are:) We number them with a -01 suffix, and they also have a client name prefix, but each cluster will often have 20-30 servers. Plus it's easy to enable bash auto-complete for ssh/ping/scp based on your known hosts file.

Cheesy, but I use types of birds, based on what the machine reminds me of.

    iPhone — Chickadee
    Macbook — Pigeon
    MacbookPro — Peregrine
    Time Capsule — Grouse
    Windows box — Dodo

My team came up with using Pixar characters for server names but were told no by the Universities hostmaster. Apparently the University had previously gotten C&D letters from Disney for something similar.

I've worked places where monsters (dracula, zombie, etc.) and planets (mars, europa, etc.) were names.

The periodic table example seems the most useful, as it's roughly the size of a /24.

My University CS department used classical music composers: copland, holst, strauss, &c.

One place I worked at used the seven dwarves as machine names (not that many machines at that time). I can understand the need to use functional names where dozens (or hundreds) of servers are accessed by dozens (or hundreds or thousands) of people.

On my personal network I use ship names from Iain Banks Culture books.

At work, we use our pet names for physical servers, and city names for virtual servers (and my partner always gives me grief over truth-or-consequences). One problem we found is that we now have to maintain a mapping of city names to customers, so moving forward, we're naming our virtual servers after customers.

Our main servers are named after X-Files characters

scully.domain.com

mulder.domain.com

skinner.domain.com

reyes.domain.com

etc. :)

We have other servers with single roles given "normal" names, such as chat.domain.com and mail.domain.com

At my former company we used car names (yugo, veyron, fetish (yes that's a car), ...) and at some other we used (Slovenian) river names (sava, drava, mura, ...).

Where I work now, we use super heroes (batman, hulk, ironman, ...).

I use punctuation for my home servers.

  Solidus /
  Guillemet >>
  Pilcrow ¶
  Interrobang ‽
  Snark .~
  Numero #
  Caret ^
  Bullet *
  Tilde ~

I worked for a company where naming conventions for the server farm were left to me, so I used Transformers names: jetfire, mudflap, landmine, and so on.

We use the last names of famous 80's baseball players

Mattingly Gooden Puckett Dawson Ripken Gwynn Saberhagen

I use animals from the Simpsons, but I have to admit, santas-little-helper is not fun to type.

We were using Dakota numbers for server names. It is a little typing when you hit 8 and 9.

I use composers for my slices: copland, glass, tallis, bach

We use philosophers: sartre, camus, plato, aristotle, etc.

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