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Comment by mileza | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this multiple times, and there seems to be a pattern emerging.

At first, people name the machines after the software they install on it. Then, when you get to about 4-5 machines, you start finding a "cute" naming convention (Constellations, Star Trek ships, mythological figures). As long as there is only a handful of machines, it's easier to remember which machine does what.

Then, as you start to scale up, between a few tens to a hundred, finding names gets harder, so you switch to a more standard naming conventions. Something that communicates the physical/logical location and the organizational unit, as well as an index for duplicates / replicas / redundant machines.

So I think it's fine to be clever as long as it's manageable. The moment it's going to start getting out of hand you can switch to a more scalable approach.

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"Pets" vs "cattle" is the classic metaphor. When your pet is sick, you take care of it, when "mp-32h-12b" is down you take it out and shoot it.

yes, of course, we had a small legacy cluster where I named our 36-odd machines after star trek ships. Knowing full well that when we went to a "real datacenter with real racks", the names would be rack-number/slot-number. My big mistake was zero indexing the slots. Never again.

What? How can zero indexing be a mistake?

If you're the only person who works in the rack, no problem. I worked as a tech and wired up machines once upon a time, ran fiber to core infrastructure, was boots on the ground for any physical access to the rack that was required, etc. I would not be surprised to hear a story of someone counting from 1 from the back of the rack and unplugging machine "7" or something.

> If you're the only person who works in the rack, no problem.

It's still likely bad. Your brain is simply not wired to zero index physical objects.

Which makes sense, as there can't be "negative" objects, mostly.

Building floors are more ambiguous - there can be basement, ie "negative" floors. So, floors in continental Europe are generally indexed 0-based (basements ..., -2, -1, ground floor = 0, upper floors 1, 2, ...). A German friend of mine caused some confusion when she checked into her student dorm at a US college, and having being told that her room was on the first floor, asked whether there was an elevator, as she had heavy suitcases.

In French, the first floor is called "Rez-de-chaussée" and the uppers are what called "Etage". So it's actually 1 based.

But the etage above the Rez-de-chaussée is 1, correct? The Rez-de-chaussée then is 0. That is 0-based indexing.

  US  D  F
   3  2  2
   2  1  1
 __1__0__RdC
  B1 -1  je ne sais pas

There is no Etage 0. People will just confusingly look at you if you ever said that. And the "Je ne sais pas' is called "Sous-sol"

You can have multiple basement levels, which get numbered again. 1er Sousl-sol, 2eme Sous-sol etc. The ground floor might not be explicitly labeled as zero but the number between "one up" and "one down" is still zero.

In a lot of elevators rez-de-chaussée is labelled 0. We just don't use that when communicating

We had a guy zero index a stack of shared Colo racks in one of our DCs a decade ago.

I sent remote hands to pull a server for a customer that was done with their contract and another for failure not pay.

Got the wrong boxes, disconnected two customers, put the servers on the shelf and left for the weekend.

So I cut a ticket to the next remote hands guy and tell home to get the boxes back up and running and we'll deal with it Monday.

Cut another ticket to a third text Monday to pull the boxes. Yeah, you guessed it wrong boxes again. Same customers, what the fuck.

Have the boxes reracked and drive out there to do it myself. Count the servers, wrong label, do some digging around, 'OH'. Pull the right server. Loose two customers. Cut tickets for all racks to be relabeled starting from one.

People don't expect 0 index in the physical world. It's just too clever by half.

The racks I've worked with have the slots labelled already, starting from 1.

Confirmed. Cute doesn’t scale. At google, a building I was in had conference rooms named after craters on Mars. This didn’t work as well in practice as it sounded on paper.

Talk of naming conventions puts me in mind of https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

we named our prototype chips after British nuclear test codenames and all machines used to be terminator characters :).

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