I’ve ended up with a number of machines on my network, and a need to name them all in a somewhat logical way. For several years I had them named after the planets, which worked well until the PCs for myself, my girlfriend, servers and Raspberry Pi’s quickly summed up to more than the eight planets. I’ve broadened it somewhat to include any Greek/Roman mythological figure, but the system is definitely not as clean as it used to be.
Do you have a coordinated naming theme for your machines?
If only there was an excellent database to store where Hedwig.bthl4.sea.wa.goliath.corp was and maybe include an alias so you know it’s NNTP5.goliath.corp also.
I shall invent one. It shall replicated and synchronize quickly. It shall interface and accept changes and share data. It will be simple to query so everyone can use it. I shall call it DNS . If people get snippy, I shall next invent an HS record.
Learn to use the tools, man. It’ll help you adhere to a 40-year-old RFC on naming things.
I’ll get right on rearchitecting the dns infrastructure of a large sprawling corporation, with mountains of technical debt from decades of acquisitions where they just mashed shit together. I’m sure that project will get approved.
Don’t be condescending, man.
Well I’m glad you know it’s there!
I can’t comment on your particular technical debt, as I’m not very psychic. I like how you say not to be condescending and require me to be psychic. That’s cool, but I bet you’re stressed.
Have a good week.
Yes, if you’ve built the network from scratch that works. Retrofitting it into an existing network however is a massive piece of work when you don’t have that single source of truth to start with however. On networks I’ve built sensibly, I’ll happily give people whatever CNAME they want to refer to their machine, but the machines actual name is descriptive, not the other way round.
I am 100% with you on this. At work the name should instantly tell me everything I need to know about the system at a glance.
Rfc1178 be damned.