RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

Re:RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990) by JBlue42 on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @11:37PM (#16751693)

>They're also unpronounceable - you can't communicate them to other people verbally quickly or reliably.

This is my recent life as I started a (hopefully temporary) phone support role and the place I work has desktops with names like that but also, inexplicably, using all the hard letters in to hear well over the phone.

Ex: HPDHHPDEDPD-TS

Thanks goodness the folks I'm talking to can use a semblance of the phonetic alphabet.

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Re:RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990) by Jaruzel on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @04:28AM (#16753022)

It's 'horses for courses' - what works for one organisation might not work for another. Scale is also an issue; you can't use clever word based names when you have 50,000 desktops on the estate.

Again, in my view (based on several years as a support monkey at the beginning of my career), desktops/laptops should be named based on their asset tags, LT891334 or DT993115 etc. That way, when you ask the user 'what's the machine name' and they have no idea, you can say 'read me the number that's on that big white sticker on the lid'.

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Re:RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990) by JBlue42 on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @10:01PM (#16761168)

>Again, in my view (based on several years as a support monkey at the beginning of my career), desktops/laptops should be named based on their asset tags, LT891334 or DT993115 etc. That way, when you ask the user 'what's the machine name' and they have no idea, you can say 'read me the number that's on that big white sticker on the lid'.

I wasn't disagreeing with you at all and I really like your solution. I was trying to provide an example of desktops I deal with now that are sometimes impossible to distinguish on the phone without going full NATO alphabet.

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