Re: Server naming conventions

["Bristol, Gary L." <gbristol () OU EDU>]

We have a variety of server naming schemas.

Major baseball teams, star wars, presidents, Top Gun, Batman and Superman characters and alter egos, and such but a new 
set of names from the Nix group was quite interesting and I had to look them up to make sure they were valid and not an 
attempt to slip something by.

Altamaha, aswang, barmanu, and ahool.

Especially the last one as it is just too close, but they are actual words, do a search, you will be surprised how 
creative System Administrators can be.

-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Barry 
Lynam
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2010 5:30 PM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Server naming conventions

Was also resisting replying.  We've moved to using just service names as we
move to virtual machines.  Uses never usually knew the real names anyway.
The best set of names used was from our faculty of Build Environment and
Engineering, BEE, so honey.bee, bumble.bee, killer.bee etc.

We've also had some very groan worthy and cringe worthy.  Supercomputer back
in the early 90's called sesame so that on terminal servers, you typed "open
sesame".  Also has a student email host that basically just ran pine
originally called turkey.  Also had a development box that accidentally
became production, config error, it was called drongo.  A drongo is a bird,
but in Australian slang is a bit of a fool, maybe takes a while to get the
joke.  We received complaints.

Barry


On 12/02/10 8:06 AM, "Hammond, Stanley" <shammond () CAPECOD EDU> wrote:

> Quote: "What kinds of naming conventions do everyone follow when
> building new servers?"
>
> I have seen everything across the board with server naming conventions:
> One system administrator at an institution used comic book characters
> (X-Men) for the servers running the databases for the financial
> applications and while another administrator used Greek/Norse mythology
> names for the mail, web and research servers.  One Novell administrator
> was a band musician and used the instrument (trombone, tuba, etc.) for
> server names.  I was checking DNS records with our service provider
> (another university) and they used the Scooby-Doo characters/objects
> (shaggy, fred, mystery) for their servers.  Currently, we are on the
> "boring" side with server names like most using "esx" for ESX servers,
> "ex" for Exchange servers, etc.  It just seems to be the preference of
> the system administrator on what they like.
>
> Stan Hammond
> Information Security Specialist
> Cape Cod Community College

--
Barry Lynam | Information Security Manager | IT Services | QUT
Phone: +61 7 3138 9408 | Fax: +61 7 3138 2921
Postal:  Level 3, 88 Musk Ave, Kelvin Grove | GPO Box 2434 | Brisbane QLD
4001
Email: b.lynam () qut edu au | http://www.qut.edu.au/security/
CRICOS No 00213J