RE: SERVER NAMES

["York, Tracy (CEI-Atlanta)" <Tracy.York () cox com>]

One word... BEER.

McEwans
Tennants
John Courage

...you get the picture.

-TY

"Give beer to those who are perishing..."
(Proverbs 31:6)


-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Evans [mailto:pre () pre org]
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 5:35 AM
To: Patrick Greenwell
Cc: nanog () merit edu
Subject: Re: SERVER NAMES



On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Patrick Greenwell wrote:

> Not picking on you in particular, but isn't one of the greatest
> advantages to having DNS to offer *meaningful* names to
> machines(assuming anything other than a home network?)
>
> It's nice to be able to go in to a company and see machines named
> "www1, www2, mx1, mx2" etc. which offer some indication as to
> their purpose rather than "maverick, foozlebutt, blarg", etc.
> which offers no such indication. I know it isn't as fun, but it
> certainly seems to be much more useful (IMO of course...)
On our network we use "proper hostnames" for the machines and their
base addresses, and then associate mundane things like 'www' or 'ns0'
as logical interfaces - means we can swing a service from one
machine to another without needing to mess with base addresses.

As for what those proper hostnames are, historically we've used Pooh
characters (tigger being the company's first server, because he who
put it together wasn't entirely sure it wouldn't bounce regularly). We
ran out of those a while back, so new internal servers are being named
after muppets, office workstations are based after underground
stations (guess who got cockfosters for an NT box), and the mail
servers I'm putting together at the moment are named after appropriate
chocolate bars (flake, timeout and so on...)

One of our competitors seems to have servers named after cigarette
brands, which was rather novel. There are few pleasures in day to day
sysadmin/netadmin work, no reason to give up the chance to use
original hostnames...original not applying to gods, chemical elements
and the like!

-- 
Patrick Evans - Sysadmin, bran addict and couch potato
pre at pre dot org                     www.pre.org/pre