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?
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.
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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
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
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.
I am 100% with you on this. At work the name should instantly tell me everything I need to know about the system at a glance.
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.
So more of a “cattle” than “pet” approach in general?