Standards: Web Servers' names | Tech Off

Odin

Do you have a policy or a naming convention for your web servers's names? How do you name them?

I'm working on our new production farm and historically, we have been using strange names such as WebP1 and WebPx7. Nobody knows why they have been named like that and what P or Px stand for.

Because I'm grouping applications on servers by functionality (of course keeping the load factor in my mind), why not name servers like Support1, Support2, Downloads1 and etc? It will be much easier to remote desktop to a server by its name, instead of look for the server's name in admin's charts (oh my, you dont want to see these charts).

May be Microsoft has something in best practice and patterns?

Manip

hehe best practices..

I name them girls names mainly previous girl-friend's names.. Smiley

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

I've used two strategies

1) Name by purpose
Name them things like INTRANET, OWA, etc.
This gets to be a real pain when you want to change what it does or even (gasp) multi-task a server. Some things like SQL Server don't like having the computer renamed out from under them.

2) Name to taste
Pick a show or genre or collection. Name the servers after characters or elements.

For example:
GREG
PETER
BOBBY
MARCIA
JAN
CINDY
SAM
CAROL
MIKE
...

or
VEGA
ALPHA-CENTAURI
SIRIUS
POLARIS
...

or
dill
tarragon
mustard
bay
...

Sean

I typically use names of planets, then again, I'm a small biz guy, so I suppose with a medium and definitely large/enterprise, you'll run out of planets. Smiley

Rod

Mine are named after streets I've lived on.

Ashbury, Briarwood, Cardston, Dansey, Erskine, Fraser, Grant, Hornby

Works for me...

Sabot
B ++

Boringly enough it all get messly if you have allot of servers, and they are all over the place.

This is what we do ...

1) First three letters is the location code.

LON - London, POT - Portsmouth, BIS - BRISTOL, that kind of thing.

2) Then the next three characters is what the machine does.

WA - Windows application, WWS - Windows Webservice,
SQL - SQL Server, SQO - Oracle, DNS - DNS server, FIR - firewall

3) The following three characters is a unique number, 001, 055, you get the point.

So a server name could be, LONSQL001 ... simple, easy, tells you where it is, what it does and what unique server it is! All in as few characters as possible so it's easy to remember and type in quickly.

... Plus, cool for writting scripts, for example I want to update all the servers in a location, you can build a string to just say .... "BIS*" ... I think you get the message.

It's very boring, as I said, but makes it well easy to look after.

-Sabot

Dr. Shim
Inaniloquent monomathical people inlapidate me.

That's an easy one. I have 6 computers here, and their named PC1 through PC6. Under the description of the machine, I entered the owner's name.

Odin

After thinking a bit (sometimes it helps Wink ), I decided not to go with a real descriptive names for servers. The reason is simple - we have around 50 servers and sometimes we want to replace them or we bought new servers and we are moving our applications around, so the server Support1 is no longer have that Support application on it. I do not want to change the name of a server every time I change its purpose.

I like Sabot's naming convention, but we have only one location. I'm going to offer this solution to my web admin and discuss details. I will skip the location part and will use the rest of it: Role and Number.

ScaleOvenStove
They have the Internet on computers now?

Just make sure you dont put an underscore the name, it will give you problems!

sbc
GW R/Me

Under what circumstances does the underscore cause problems? Any links to articles? Many people do use underscores and it is not obvious why a problem would occur (after all, Windows allows them).

Mike Dimmick

sbc wrote:

Under what circumstances does the underscore cause problems? Any links to articles? Many people do use underscores and it is not obvious why a problem would occur (after all, Windows allows them).

Underscore isn't valid in 'standard' DNS (RFC 1123) but was valid for NetBIOS names.

See DNS Naming Restrictions.