Re: sage-members-digest V1 #144

[shc@chevron.com (S.H. Couturie)]

Paul Caskey wrote:
> 
> 
> I'm currently working for a government research lab, and the whole
> facility is essentially one big Dilbert strip, but they follow this kind
> of naming scheme, too, and it seems to work quite well.  I always liked
> meaningless names like "frodo" or "hydra", as recommended by that RFC
> someone referred to (if I remember correctly), but I can't find any
> flaws in this scheme.  Ours in particular uses 8 characters, like
> sahp1234 or slss2345:
> 

I strongly recommend following Don Libes's recommendation in that RFC.
It is very convenient to be able to refer to machines by a pronouncable
word ("fred", "bedrock", "dogbert",...).  It is trivial to create an
alias to encode meanings you might possibly want (eg, an alias which
specifies that it is an SGI or Sun or whatever).  Having to spell out a
hostname is simply awkward.

Any naming scheme which encodes things like location (room number)
or primary user ("george") or primary function ("mail") into the canonical
name is just asking for trouble; all of those things will undoubtably 
change during that machines lifetime, sometimes frequently (consider
printers, which seem to get moved A LOT around here, and somebody had
the not-very-bright idea of encoding their room numbers into their
names; consider fixing lp or lpr queue setups on hundreds of machines
just because of this...:-(((().

All such secondary characteristics of a machine properly belong in
some sort of a database, not in the name.  For not-too-big sites,
a flat file works just fine; all that info can be in comments in the
source file for your DNS zone or NIS hosts map or /etc/hosts or whatever
is the moral equivalent.

Anyway, my primary rule: the hostname must be a word.  When a user gets
a new UNIX workstation here, we send him/her a copy of Don Libes's 
RFC for guidance, and tell 'em "We need a name before we can install
your new machine.  Think of it as a pet..."..  (Of course, we use a 
temporary name to configure the machine while the user thinks up a name;
once we have the name, it is usually a few seconds to rename the machine...)



Steve
-- 
Steve Couturie  |  Chevron, LaHabra UNIX Systems  |  shc@lahabra.chevron.com
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