New style
Posted on 06/02/
New style for the blog! Contributed by Pau Puig, one of CAPSiDE's workers.
Thanks Pau!
Machine naming schemes
Posted on 06/02/
When you industrialize your systems management (you are a hosting provider), or you simply have LOTS of machines for whatever reason, you have the need of a naming scheme. You have probably been naming machines by:
- Planets: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Pluto, ...
- Constellations: Andromeda, Orion, ...
- Winds: Tramuntana, Xaloc, Garbí, ... (Here in Catalonia these are used a lot!)
- LOTR: Mordor, Shire, ...
So you start naming machines with a scheme that helps you localize them: r01p01.net.example.com means rack 01 position 01 (positions starting from the rack bottom), for example. The downside is that once you have standardized the machine names, you loose that special "think of a name" moment, and the freakiness of the thing all together (people that are in IT usually don't know that machines even have names!)
I personally name my machines (and electronic devices that have computer-like functionality) with names of robots that appear in Futurama. So I have Bender, Flexo, Roberto, Calculon, etc. It's funny when I get into my bosses car and the hands free display says "Kwanzabot", and to see the HELO in SMTP headers display "SINCLAIR-2K".
Of course this is not a new thing, and RFC 1178 has some interesting situations in the "what NOT to do" guidelines XD. I'm pretty sure that most of us have fallen into one of the situations described in the RFC.
The bottom line is "try to have fun naming!" (when you can)