Web Hosting Talk : Other Forums : Web Hosting Lounge : Rack / server naming conventions

[[inx]Olly]

Having just moved into our lovely new suite, I am in charge of re cataloguing all our racks and servers.

This is mainly aimed at those with suites / racks.

I am sure as most of you will agree, while our job is great at times, there are times when you need some fun, and cheering up.

I have an idea, not an original one, granted.

I'd like to name our racks for example:

Narnia
Action
Science Fiction
Comic books

And in each rack, corresponding characters for the servers. Note this will eb limited to our own dedis and game server machines. NOTE Colo customers will be in seperate racks! Only the dc techs and our staff will see these labels!

For example, in Action:

Terminator
Rambo

So a full label, would be for example

b52-24-rambo

Where 24 is the switch port.

I think this will be a fun way of remembering things, and is harmless. In fact, given the way our memory actually works, it's an excellent way of finding servers very quickly.

The techs at the datacentre all think it's an excellent idea, have even been helping me think up names. One even remarked that it would be much easier and quicker to locate server this way, when we aren't onsite!

And let's face, big companies do it as well!

Aaron, the other director in the company thinks its unprofessional and a bad idea (stick in the mud ).

Thoughts please

[Project X]

thats cute.

for my name servers, one set has my kids names and another set has the names of fred, ethel, lucy and ricky, (from i love lucy). another set has cities where i live. anything to avoid the dull and mundane!

[case]

I recommend staying away from cute naming conventions. Descriptive naming conventions are best. We just converted about 500 machines because the last idiot admins didn't realize the company was gonna grow at a very large rate. Took us several months to finalize.

lax.httpd01-r101-u52.domain.org

location, function, rack and unit location in rack.

you can also use inside hostnames too

[Project X]

case is right again.

if you have tons of boxes, trying to keep up with all those silly names is sure to be tedious.

for someone like me, it isnt that hard at all! i dont have 500 boxes.

[Bakie]

I personally like the idea of name names (if that makes sense) e.g. http://www.jaguarpc.com/support/status.php but naming it like case said seems more "smart".

[(Stephen)]

I really prefer names that can also be used for inventory.
for Instance:
JHMIAR160U I can know exactly what it is from the name, as well as all staff.
This is really the best way in my experience.

[Nich]

I find naming my servers very exciting! I'm a big Lord of the Rings fan, so all my servers are named after something from there:

helmsdeep, shire, gondor, rivendell, mordor (the only tower server, get it?), fangorn, etc.

These are for all my colocated servers in my rackspace (I'm not a web host btw). I find it very easy to tell the DC techs "reboot <name>" in my rackspace, rather than reboot xz2-1-5-512-d-gz-gh-124. But then again, I would reconsider my stance for 500 servers

[FluffyTigger]

mythical god/goddess' name.

[Mike V]

We used to run some game servers named after various brands of hard alcohol. Am I the only person that names small server setups after booze?

*sigh* I still miss the Bacardi 151 Battlefield 1942 server. Lots of fond memories. Plenty of fuzzy ones, too

On a larger scale I name servers after city, function, and then a number. Like SEA-EXCH-01. Boring, but practical.

[El Nino]

At my old job, we labeled all our servers after names from the Star Wars movies. We had darth, 3cpo, r2d2, yoda, ob1, anakin(became the "new darth" when it the old one got retired) and tons of other names like that. The heaviest used server was named Leia (because that server was always being hammered with traffic ).

[WirralNet Matt]

My hosting servers are name after snakes:

- Python
- Cobra
- Viper
- Adder
- Boa

However, my streaming media servers are just boring, named after shoutcast:

- SC1
- SC2
- SC3

I never really liked the idea of naming servers until about June last year, when I decided it might be better to help clients by giving the servers names as we use more and more servers, so clients can visit the outage status page and when it lists an outage, the server names in question are listed. Maybe one day I will give the streaming media servers name, but they never go down...

[whatever]

In any case, never name a server ALPHA or BETA. I was with a hosting provider in 1999, and their server names never inspired confidence. Sure - they had some remotely normal server names, such as Fire, but I didn't like being put on the Beta server.

Just some helpful advice..

[shaunewing]

When you get to a certain number of servers and racks, naming them after characters/planets/etc simply isn't scalable.

We have our racks in groups of 16 ('suites') - and name them accordingly. For example, rack 5 in suite 8 would be called "s8r5".

Access switches and other peripherals in each rack are also labelled in that fashion - eg: "sw2.s8r5.popname.domain", "pdu1.s8r5.popname.domain", etc.

As for actual server names:

Most of our web servers are in groups. Groups are then based on the phonetic alphabet, eg:

node14.delta.domain.

Other servers in our fleet are named based on their group, and the majority are named based on asset tag, with an alias pointing to it. eg: "AT-DMHJH1S.domain" might host "mx3.domain".

-Shaun

[cywkevin]

Originally Posted by case

I recommend staying away from cute naming conventions. Descriptive naming conventions are best. We just converted about 500 machines because the last idiot admins didn't realize the company was gonna grow at a very large rate. Took us several months to finalize.

lax.httpd01-r101-u52.domain.org

location, function, rack and unit location in rack.

you can also use inside hostnames too

You could always use a comprehensive database system to store your server details such as rack location etc. along with work history and maintenance logs. Hell you could even cycle through the database to see which servers are being neglected.

Cute naming systems shouldn't hinder your work.

[case]

Originally Posted by pixelized

You could always use a comprehensive database system to store your server details such as rack location etc. along with work history and maintenance logs. Hell you could even cycle through the database to see which servers are being neglected.

Cute naming systems shouldn't hinder your work.

I would hope that every company uses some sort of asset tracking software. It certainly would hinder my ability to work if I was tied to piece of software for information regarding our entire network. We use SNMP and IPMI to monitor everything accross our network. If I can identify everything I need to know about that machine via hostname, then I've saved valuable company time by not using this asset tracker in each and every instance.