How do you name your servers?
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@scottalanmiller
How do you name it now with multiple servers? I have 5 and it is going by numerical. -
Now we use practical names that include location, OS family and application. Like this...
to-lnx-web
That would be our web server running on Linux in Toronto. If there is a cluster or many of them, we'd do...
to-lnx-web1
to-lnx-web2Like that. Simple to remember, simple to convey, meaningful.
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If you don't have multiple locations, you could do away with the location prefix. But just about everyone has multiple locations, even if in the same building.
If you only use Windows or only Linux you could drop that. You could also go down to a single letter to make things shorter. w, l, f, s, etc. We use win, lnx, sol (Solaris), bsd, etc.
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I use two letters for company name followed by vendor followed by main role. I drop the vendor when it's MS stuff.
ur-ad1
ur-ad2
ur-bond-webetc
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I have heard that while silly,.. people using Disney Characters for names..
I have also heard that for security reasons, you should not name them AD1 or ExchangeTwo... But that was 'heard' and not verified.
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server1
server2
POS3 (piece of S*** 3)
server4.....
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An old place I worked used name of Star Trek ships.
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@gjacobse said:
I have heard that while silly,.. people using Disney Characters for names..
I have also heard that for security reasons, you should not name them AD1 or ExchangeTwo... But that was 'heard' and not verified.
That's commonly said. But it is, wait for it, security through obscurity. It's true that writing "super critical data that we just protect at all costs" on a server name is probably dumb, announcing that something is a web server on Linux or AD on Windows probably does nothing. Anyone on the network already knows what services those things are offering. Trying to obfuscate that makes it harder for the people on the network but an attacker likely would not notice.
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@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.
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@Dashrender said:
An old place I worked used name of Star Trek ships.
That's great if you can remember that there are more ships than NCC-1701A -E.. I'd need the History of StarFleet to keep up with them.
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@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.
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@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
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@scottalanmiller said:
@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!
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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.
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LOL - I didn't say it was a good long term plan - he simply asked what people were doing
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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.
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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
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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.
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At home my computers use Star Wars planets as names.
At work... spoilers
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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 etcIn the age of virualisation and rapid deployment of new servers, this seems to be only practical approach in my opinion.
