Naming Conventions

When a server is built, it needs a name. Generally, I.T. organizations have a standard naming convention to excise creativity from this process.

Most often, the format goes something like (Shortened Company Name)(Location)(Purpose)(Number).

There are extremes, of course. One company I worked for used the machine's service tag to accelerate and simplify warranty support and slow down and complicate internal identification.

Another company used the Standard format for user-accessible servers and the model names of motorcycles for everything else.

At our house, most machines are named after fictional fantasy locations -- Most often those drawn from Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. That has worked well, mostly, except that someone at Comcast uses the same naming convention for some of their routers so (unless I run my own DNS) my MP3 collection tends to get lost from time to time.

This organization uses the names of planets. No numbers, no purpose, no useful identification, no nothing but the names of planets.

In addition to confusing the new hires, this particular naming convention limits the possible machine names to just a few different possibilities. In fact, I've already heard horror stories about when they needed to recently decommission Pluto.

But anyway, the point is this:

We needed a new system and all the planet names were taken. So we used "Miranda".

"O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

It is a quiet and peaceful server. Just ignore the Reavers, please.

kthxbye

--G

Even my henchmen think I'm crazy . . .