How do you name your servers?

Dashrender

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

An old place I worked used name of Star Trek ships.

Naming trends like that only work well if you have very few servers with low turnover. Otherwise you are getting into really obscure names that defeat the purpose.

Very true - this wasn't in use after they had around 15-20 servers. then they moved to something like Scott's or my naming convention.

Of course you could have the "Mark 1" and then the "Mark 2". LOL

Don't even get me started on that crap!

scottalanmiller

Here is an issue that we ran into with the "Star Trek" style names (ours were cities.)

When we repurposes a server, say from being an IIS App server to being an Email server we would not rename it from Salzburg to Innsbruck as that would be weird, right? And you would run out of names quickly. The physical hardware was known as Salzburg and Salzburg it would stay throughout its life. Sensible. Sort of.

But now if to-lnx-db1, a database server, gets repurposed into an email server, it gets renamed to to-lnx-ex1 or whatever. Way more useful for people who need to access it based on what it "does" rather than based on "which physical hardware it is on."

As we move to virtual and way moreso to cloud, conventions like Austrian cities can't work. You make and destroy so much more quickly and names don't hang around. With cloud, how do you autoprovision city names or Star Trek ships? Do you run a naming server that stores thousands of city or ship names and keeps track of when they have been handed out and removes them from circulation once they have been handed out? You could eat through hundreds of names per day if you are on cloud.

Dashrender

LOL - I didn't say it was a good long term plan - he simply asked what people were doing

wrx7m

I have about 25 and go with a basic two letter followed by a two digit number. So for domain controllers, it is DC01, DC02, etc. For File/Print, it is FP01, FP02. I also have boxes that are "IT only"; things like spiceworks, prtg, WDS/MDT, Veeam, etc and each of those servers gets IT01, IT02, IT03, etc.

Jason

We name ours based on Business unit, geographic location, then function and then staring with 01 and going up for each of the same function at the same location.

so a SQL server in LA, for the fake business united called Sam's Mart (okay just copying Sam's club/walmart for this example) might be

SMLA-SQL01

stacksofplates

All of my desktops/laptops are transformer names. My desktop is Megatron, my laptop is Ironhide, and my other laptop is Bonecrusher.

Servers are just what their purpose is and if there is more than one, I just add a number after. So ZeroTier, Drupal, FreePBX, etc.

nadnerB

At home my computers use Star Wars planets as names.

At work... spoilers

Carnival Boy

I used to give them girl's names but now I just name them after their role, plus a number.
So
SQL01, SQL02, EXCH01, ESXCH02, DC01, DC02, FILESERV01, SHAREPT01 etc etc

In the age of virualisation and rapid deployment of new servers, this seems to be only practical approach in my opinion.

aaron-closed account

This post is deleted!

JaredBusch

@aaron said:

class of server-location id-incrementing number

Cute names become counter productive with more than a handful.

I once named everything on a network after characters from The 5th Element.

Everything is named based on client - purpose - sequence

Example: ntgdc01

scottalanmiller

@Carnival-Boy said:

I used to give them girl's names but now I just name them after their role, plus a number.
So
SQL01, SQL02, EXCH01, ESXCH02, DC01, DC02, FILESERV01, SHAREPT01 etc etc

In the age of virualisation and rapid deployment of new servers, this seems to be only practical approach in my opinion.

Yeah, I agree. When you had physical servers that lasted a decade and only a few of them saying "Betty is down", or "The Enterprise has been infected with malware" or "Vienna is running slow today" was effective because we treated each one like a person and everyone dealt with just a few of them. It made sense in smaller environments. I still remember the roles of our two biggest Windows NT 4 boxes from the 1990s. They each made it ten years and were named Vienna and Salzburg. I can still tell you the memory configs on them, what apps they ran, their RAID configs, their processors, and their full histories. There were our babies, so naming them as such made sense.

But now that we create and destroy VMs every day and have tons and tons more of them that would just not work like it used to. It used to take months or years to decommission a physical box. Now we turn off a VM in seconds.