>I personally don't name machines by "what they are", for very good reason.
>Plus, no one but the admin group uses the "real" machine names, also for
>very good reason. Here's some illustrative examples...
>
>If you call an HP K370 "k370.somedomain.com", and then upgrade it to a K570
>by just adding a few more cpu cards, do you really want to still call it
>K370.somedomain.com? If not, you have to retrain your user community and
>this is a pain, and kinda defeats the whole idea of using meaningful names
>so people don't need to know IP addresses. As a result, machine names
>generally indicate what they are used for... so a machine that processes
>orders might be "orders.somedomain.com". However, this can cause issues
>unless the second point below is heeded...
>
>If you give machines names that indicate "what they do" rather than "what
>they are", you can then run into problems if you do clustering, or if a
>machine goes down for a while (hardware issues), or more commonly, if for
>load reasons you need to move an application to a different machine. Thus -
>(IMHO), machines should have a "real" name that has nothing to do with what
>it is or what it does. These real hostnames are typically what admin people
>will use. Then, define CNAME's for the applications that the machine serves
>up...this is what "users" use.
Some good points, and they definitly apply to my VMS systems. I name my
VMS systems after Doc Savage characters. Originally they were all
clustered together, but due to electricity costs, and the problems I have
with cooling, I'm down to only running one full time. That system is
called 'MONK'. Monk started out as a lowely (even for me at the time),
DEC 3000/300LX with a BA350 attached (acting as a simple fileserver).
Later, once I got a couple DE500's (100Mbit ethernet controllers) I moved
the BA350 (which contained the system disk and other drives) to a
AlphaStation 200 4/233 obviously no reason to change the name from Monk, I
just had to change the ethernet interface. Still later, I got married and
moved, but my DSL line stayed behind for a month. By this time I was
really dependant on Monk for several things (email, file, and printserver),
so I dupped the drives in the BA350's (two by then), and the AlphaStation
200 4/233 and my firewall stayed behind while Monk developed a 'split'
personality as I brought up a 2nd Monk, this time an AlphaStation 500/333.
A month later I had the DSL line transferred, and was back to just one
Monk.
Still later, moved the disks again, this time to the PWS 433au, that is
Monk's current incarnation (though with only one BA350 as I've now got
larger disks, and the system disk is internal so I can benifit from the
Internal UW-SCSI). The last upgrade was the least transparent as it
involved upgrading to OpenVMS 7.2-1H1, and merging several disks, however,
the next time I do such an upgrade it will be transparent as it's now setup
correctly. Still, every upgrade was managed such that it was basically
transparent to the users (even the last, as while it took a couple days, I
still had a live Monk up and running while doing the migration).
Monk has really come a long way from being a simple fileserver on what was
to me pretty lowely hardware. He's my Mailserver and Printserver, as well
as still acting as a fileserver (Appletalk, Samba, and NFS), and a private
web server. Both my wife and I log into him (either via Telnet or via LAT
and a terminal server) and do stuff (she just does email, but I do all
sorts of stuff), and I occasionally bring up a DECwindows session over the
net on either my Mac or XP system. When I get the time, the next
enhancement will be to have him also act as a DNS server,and I've
considered having him act as a USENET news server as well. Eventually I'll
most likely upgrade him to a DS10 or better, and eventually, to an Itanium
system (but this will be well after the OpenVMS port is done). In all
honesty the upgrade I'm most interested in is replacing the BA350 with a
pair of BA356's.
Does all this have a point, not really, but it does provide a detailed
example of how a system can change over the course of a few years, and yet,
to any users, that change is basically transparrent (except for the
increase in speed and resources).
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh_at_aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
Received on Tue Oct 22 2002 - 13:01:00 BST