> EDIT: found it: https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/

One problem I see, specifically for the environment, is that "dev" is now a TLD (thanks Google!), so you have to be careful should you try to do a short cut like "web01.dev" you may get a surprise depending on your resolv.conf:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.dev

Lots of 'generic' TLDs now thanks to ICANN:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...

There's both ".accountant" and ".accountants".

The article describes geographic sub-domains, and uses "nyc" as an example, but that's a TLD now as well. It may be better to use UN/LOCODE as a starting point:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN/LOCODE

If you don't need down to the city/municipal level, then ISO 3166-2 may be useful (<nation><hyphen><subnational>):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2

Once I was moved to a new team at work, and the team leader really wanted a team name. I generated like 5 or 10 words from /usr/share/dict/words, one of which was profanity. I could tell that everyone liked Team Profanity, but no one was brave enough to adopt it. I really wish we had, because there was much cursing on that team.

Minor correction: path is /usr/share/dict/words

Thanks, fixed.

I use animals, mostly. Except any ARM-based device must be named after a limb or a part of a limb that is not an arm. It must.

I use food. Abstract, but also memorable.

Back at Uni we got four new workstations so obviously I named them 'death', 'war', 'famine' and 'pestilence'. Then shortly after we added a fifth, it ended up being 'mayhem'.*

Some time later we got two more boxen and the female members of our research group were given the job of naming them, and we ended up with 'itchy' and 'scratchy'...

* for the Pratchett readers I was wrong, it should of course have been 'Kaos'...

Personally — since we're all chiming in — I use elements. My fallback DNS is a periodic table.

Please tell me you assign IP addresses based on atomic weight!

This might be the coolest thing I've read all year...

Atomic number, yes. And of course every machine has a one or two-letter alias.

Here's a more concise version, minus a few forks!

    sed "$((RANDOM % 1632 + 1))q;d" words.txt

Grab this cleaned wordlist with 1 word per line:

    wget http://nerab.github.io/wordlist/words.txt

I really like the functional naming part of this, but I don't like the idea of using random names.. I think that server names must be functional otherwise you will tend to think of them as an abstract box that, if you just install that little extra package, will be a fine webserver on top of that mailer.

Don't do it! If you're labeling hardware and need multiple functions, use virtualisation or containers, and then the host is named after that (e.g. we use Ganeti, so gnt-01, or say kube-01).

At home, I name machines after inspiring political figures and while I like the naming, it does discourage me into treating those machines as cattle, which I should do more.

I prefer to have mostly meaningless names for machines, and then having more names for them in DNS for their various functions. That way the functions can be moved about the machines and if that's what you care about, then that's how you refer to them (deploy the app Foobar to web01 and web02), but when a machine goes down, you can shout, "clark is down!" web01/dns01/sto01 being down only means the service is down, whereas clark being down is something more severe.

I manage my stuff with Ansible, which makes all this pretty easy.

here if "fsn-node-01" is down, we know it's a major ganeti node that dies. if "unifolium" dies, ... can you guess what happens?

at first I couldn't either, but then I learned it's an old KVM node hosting a bunch of virtual machines, and it means pain, definitely something severe. yet it's not meaningfully different from "corsicum" dying (which is "just" a VM).

adding meaning to machines reduces the cognitive burden (for oldies) and discovery burden (for newcomers) of figuring out what is what.

that assumes you don't run services bare-metal. if you do, then maybe it makes sense to use meaningful names for those, but in general, I strongly try to avoid doing that anyways... and if I do, having a functional name for that metal is mostly harmless: if the function changes, the name changes, and then I need to do a name change, which I allow for.

but that is rare, because if i dedicate full metal for a function, you can bet it won't be readily available for other purposes...

oh and forgot to mention.. at my current job, there was this practice of naming servers after onions (I'll let you guess where that is).

I had no idea how many kinds of onions there were turns out there are many, especially if you start to take in Latin names and translations...

But then I need to learn how to spell colchicifolium, and neriniflorum, and no, those two are not related (or are they) and what does meronense do again? and oh yeah corsicum is the replica of one of those...

Those naming conventions are cool until you start to document your stuff properly and start being serious about training and including new people. Then you should focus on meaningful, easy to remember, type, and generate, names.

I use the method in 'a proper naming' scheme linked here and am very happy with it. It solves all the problems mentioned in other threads here.

It is fairly straightforward to incorporate into your infrastructure as code workflow for managing your "cattle".