OT Re: Naming Computers (strategy, and WHY)

From: Huw Davies <Huw.Davies_at_kerberos.davies.net.au>
Date: Wed Oct 23 03:14:01 2002

At 10:32 AM 22/10/2002 -0500, Jay West wrote:
>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...

I think there's a big difference between what you call systems at home and
what you do in your job. At home I don't see a problem with calling a system
whatever you like and as I said before, I tend to refer to systems by their
function. If I was still naming systems for work (and by inference for lots of
other people) it'd be different. No fancy names that only you can remember the
spelling of either - it took me a long time to work out why one of the systems
at work was called IJFW01 - let's see how long it takes someone to work
that one
out....

Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies_at_kerberos.davies.net.au
                      | "If God had wanted soccer played in the
                      | air, the sky would be painted green"
Received on Wed Oct 23 2002 - 03:14:01 BST