Connecting to Server WhatsItsName

This being the holiday season and most of you doing your hardest not to think of work -- unless you are on call in which case nothing I write here can top whatever the pager on your hip says— I will deal with a relatively light topic but still one of relevance: server names.

In the early days of the Internet —say, in the late 80s and early 90s— when most servers were located on university campuses they were usually named after cartoon characters such as Snoopy.

Larger businesses preferred geographic names and used them in conjunction with departmental naming. Thus a server that was primarily used by accounting in Denver would be named something like denver_accounting; if they got a second server it would be named denver_accounting2 and so on.

These schemes appeared to work for a while, but increases in the number of physical servers combined with the surge in virtualization —not to mention the rise of mixed use servers or cross-department applications — has all but exhausted current naming schemes.

The best proof of this are the bizarre names popping up in current IT server farms. For example, some administrators just use the default name suggested by the OS on install. This results in names that are meaningless and difficult to remember such as GHXF13M or some such.

There are many articles out there that give all kinds of reasons why a server's name should reflect purpose. However, given the rate of change in modern organizations this would mean changing names for servers fairly often which would add to the network administrators list of tasks unnecessarily. The only time such a naming convention makes sense would be if the server in question is virtual and it has a specialized use. Servers that have mixed use are better off having memorable names that fit within a scalable scheme.

Another thing to remember is that, given the litigiousness of our society the the naming scheme needs to be neutral enough to not offend most people. An online article I read, described how administrators at a certain company would name their new servers based on how they felt after about the food served on a given day at their company cafeteria; so they ended up with names like "Squishy". Apart from the limited scalability of such a scheme, the potential for litigation is big enough to make it unsuitable.

So far we have fleshed out 3 principles for creating a server naming convention:
(1) User-friendliness or memorable names
(2) Scalability or a long enough list
(3) Reasonably non-offensive or prone to litigation
What remains now is to examine how we can implement each in practical terms.

1. User-friendly names
The most common non-human names we use on a daily basis are street names. The most easily remembered yet common street names correspond to names of individuals or places. The Washington, DC, is famous for using names of states on many of their streets. Names of insects might also fly, pun intended, except perhaps for some of the more queasiness-inducing ones.

2. Scalability
The main problem with rule number two is that it is in direct conflict with rule number 1. Obviously, the use of US state and territory names is not a good idea because there are less than 100. County names might be a good idea since they number over 3,000. However, no matter how big the name set used, it will have a finite limit and there ought to be a plan B for when the first set is exhausted. You should probably have on hand at least three sets of names to be used in turn as the preceding one becomes exhausted.

3. Reasonably non-offensive
Before I identify sources of names, I would like to suggest that such sources be documented for two reasons :
(a) as guide to your successors
(b) as a counter-argument to anyone who might deem a name as offensive
Now, lets turn to the sources of name sets. The US Census bureau has some wonderful data files that one can download from their web site and use free of charge or legal constraint . I especially recommend the Gazetteer section. A quick glance shows the following data sets with perfectly extractable names:
Counties (3,141 records)
MCDs [Minor Civil Divisions] (36,289 records)
Places (23,789 records)
Zips (29,470 records)

Online phone books are useful as long as you only use last names, and so are baby name sites, although I would recommend staying away from the more common ones. Even sites not usually associated with lists, such as Wikipedia, can be sources of lists that are long enough and have names that are easy enough to remember.

Now with all these names to administer you are going to need a good database to make sure there are no mixups. LDAP and/or Active Directory or whatever equivalent you have at your firm are good for basic management and search. However, for better navigability and even to store unassigned names for easy accessibility and quick implementation, an external database with an easy to use web interface would be best. Ideally the server management software should keep both databases (LDAP/AD an the server list database) synchronized and allow for search based on any combination of criteria.

In the end this should make the management of your server farms easier at a time when server proliferation is such that a company need not be named Google to list thousands of servers in its farm or farms.

I would go on to speak of workstation names, but they are of less concern. Besides, there is software out there that can do that almost automatically (such as the Windows 2000 Remote Installation Service). However, if you still need ideas for workstation names I would point you to the baby names sites for an easy source.













but trends that I have noticed suggest to me that we need a more comprehensive and scalable naming conventions than have previously been used

Some of the larger corporations have a way of