Stupid naming convention

My current place of tenure has named all their servers after Simpson characters. There's dozens of them. Anyone else burdened with this blind search for services?

Incidentally, can anyone tell me who Eddy, Mojo, Mona and Terri were in the Simpsons?

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SWM

I know the feeling. I just started a new job with servers named after cartoon characters, including the simpsons.... weird !

oh look the DC named LISA has stopped working......

astorrs

SWM wrote: »

oh look the DC named LISA has stopped working...

The worst for me was servers named after different katas in Karate, even after someone would tell you the name of the machine you'd still have to figure out how to spell it...

Q: Can you reboot NIJUSHJHO, SEIYUNCHIN and HANGETSU?
A: Umm... sure...

mikedisd2

astorrs wrote: »

Q: Can you reboot NIJUSHJHO, SEIYUNCHIN and HANGETSU?

I guess that one takes the cake. I'm just reading up on naming conventions and some people actually argue in favour of using the 7 dwarves etc.

Personally, I feel awkward talking about servers called Homer, Milhouse, Skinner etc. I also can't scan the servers to see what there is.

julzandgems

I work for a healthcare agency with a fetish for Star Wars and Disney. Do you know how much fun it is when you try to remember how to spell "anniken" ? It's ok to have fun when you're choosing a name but let's make it simple - OK ? I know how you all feel.
Julie

Pash

lighten up people. A customer I used to work for did the full star wars selection as well, was great!

veritas_libertas

I've heard rumor the NSA names all their servers after States / Provinces. Can you imagine the conversations? "Yeah, another problem in Texas sir!"

Hyper-Me

Most of our clients computers are named the auto-generated junk that windows does when you dont give it a name.

If you thin its hard finding Sneezy, wait til you try to find WIN-DFDOFKER30493024923dffk

I can't stand it.

NightShade03

While not as bad, my boss refuses to let us use any characters to separate letters.

ie Instead of NY-Server-DC it has to be nyserverdc, which looks stupid and makes scripting harder when not everyone follows the 2 digits state code.

HeroPsycho

SWM wrote: »

I know the feeling. I just started a new job with servers named after cartoon characters, including the simpsons.... weird !

oh look the DC named LISA has stopped working......

Devil's advocate: you could argue it's better for security this way because their name doesn't give away what the server's function is and what data it stores.

But it would still bug me...

cnfuzzd

On a somewhat related side note, i am thinking of initiating a policy where we name all of our client workstations after the dell service tag. What do you guys think?

john

forkvoid

cnfuzzd wrote: »

On a somewhat related side note, i am thinking of initiating a policy where we name all of our client workstations after the dell service tag. What do you guys think?

john

There are a few departments here(a large university) that do that.

We name our servers after the acronym of our College, plus a number. For example, if the department was the Redundant Department of Redundancies, the servers would be RDR1, RDR2, RDR3, etc. A previous place I worked used their company acronym, hyphen, then the main functio(ie, ABC-EXCHANGE, ABC-FILES, etc).

Our workstation naming policy is pretty sweet, though.

Three digit building code, three digit room number, one digit device type, two digit device number.

Example: Building ABC, Room 123, Desktop, second machine in the room: ABC123D02. It's fantastic. Easy to remember, easy to read, and (mostly) unintelligible to an outsider.

t3ch_guru

The servers I work on are named after movies.
Printers after super heroes.

arwes

Haven't had any cartoon character servers, but plenty of video game ones. First ISP I worked for had servers named after Ultima Online stuff, then the next one had Everquest server names (think that's right, never played EQ). The hospital I worked for was all business but someone played around with some equipment in the data center to make it display C3P0 and R2D2 on the front displays. Wish I could remember what those were, it was in the same rack as the AIX equipment.

arwes

forkvoid wrote: »

There are a few departments here(a large university) that do that.

We name our servers after the acronym of our College, plus a number. For example, if the department was the Redundant Department of Redundancies, the servers would be RDR1, RDR2, RDR3, etc. A previous place I worked used their company acronym, hyphen, then the main functio(ie, ABC-EXCHANGE, ABC-FILES, etc).

Our workstation naming policy is pretty sweet, though.

Three digit building code, three digit room number, one digit device type, two digit device number.

Example: Building ABC, Room 123, Desktop, second machine in the room: ABC123D02. It's fantastic. Easy to remember, easy to read, and (mostly) unintelligible to an outsider.

The naming convention at my former employer was like N3NS3000A. N3 meant '3rd floor north', NS is 'nursing station', 3000 is the phone extension and if there's multiple workstations to one extension it's always A or B. When someone would call me at 3:00 AM, I'd just ask which dept they're in. If they say 3 North, I just look at the extension and I can pretty much guess which computer to remote into. Much easier than walking them through trying to figure out what their computer name is.

Super99

I have stupid naming conventions that other people are stuck with.
Do these people not may attention to the recommendations from the boys & girls at Microsoft?

MentholMoose

mikedisd2 wrote: »

My current place of tenure has named all their servers after Simpson characters. There's dozens of them. Anyone else burdened with this blind search for services?

This is the naming convention on my home network!

My DCs are roy and gentleben, laptops are pinchy and at-5000, desktop is beaverotti, etc. Anyway, after enough growth it becomes unmaintainable because the show has a limited number of characters.

At my current employer the *nix machines are named mostly after big cats (lion, tiger, etc.), similar to OSX releases. It's not required so I haven't named any servers after a cat. The naming convention is not a problem since everything is in DNS and/or AD.

mikedisd2 wrote: »

Incidentally, can anyone tell me who Eddy, Mojo, Mona and Terri were in the Simpsons?

Eddie is a police officer. Mojo is the helper monkey ("pray for mojo"

). Mona Simpson is Homer's mother, who is on the lamb. Terri is Sheri's twin sister in Bart's class.

brad-

For some reason, ours are named on breeds of cats...puma, panther, etc.

For my home stuff, I named mine after bodies in the solar system...Sun, mercury, etc.

If I could choose a server naming convention, it would be something like naming it based on its primary function, or star wars terminology. I did like the superhero names for the printers though, thats awesome. I know our users dont appreciate humor though.

forkvoid

We name our computer labs after Greek names for Hell-ish things. Hades, Lethe, Hermes, Styx, etc. Lab printers are Sesame Street characters. Non-lab printers follow the standard convention. My biggest complaint is this: if you have a convention, but then make exceptions to it, why have it? I'd rather the labs and lab printers ALL be on the same convention, but apparently, that isn't an acceptable answer. Oh, to be the boss...

Peibol

Philosophers here. Kind of cool

veritas_libertas

I like the idea of naming after Greek gods. Very amusing...

tiersten

We name ours by location, type and then just a number. The problem is that the numbering isn't sequential now because machines have been replaced and retired over the years.

At home I just name everything after elements. Tried the film, tv and book naming schemes before but always ended up running out of names or being forced to use some really hard to type name because there weren't any left.

qcomer

I work for a school district of 1500+ computers, and like 15 servers or so.

We have decided to go virtual for our servers and are redoing our whole network.

Servers will be the function (ie, abc-dc1, abc-dc1, exchange, aeries, etc).

desktops/laptops will be...

Classrom: 3 digit site-RM###-WORKSTATION (so, ABC-RM102-01),
Teacher: 3 digit site-RM###-first initiallastname (so, ABC-RM101-jdoe)
Office/admin: 3 digit site-first initial last name( so, ABC-jdoe)

If their last name is longer than NETBIOS will allow, we shorten it. This helps us know that we will be using remote support (bomgar)/RDP, scripting.

Switches/Routers will be...

Site-location-fuction (so, ABC-LIB-MDF, ABC-RM102-IDF, ABC-LIB-GATEWAY)

We are building a new OU structure, IP structure, everything from the ground up.

MentholMoose

qcomer wrote: »

desktops/laptops will be...

Classrom: 3 digit site-RM###-WORKSTATION (so, ABC-RM102-01),
Teacher: 3 digit site-RM###-first initiallastname (so, ABC-RM101-jdoe)
Office/admin: 3 digit site-first initial last name( so, ABC-jdoe)

If their last name is longer than NETBIOS will allow, we shorten it. This helps us know that we will be using remote support (bomgar)/RDP, scripting.

One of my previous jobs had something like this... when I was hired, literally none of the machine names were still accurate!

People switch desks, change departments, swap computers, etc., it was just a mess trying to update the names and departments all the time, so I just eliminated that stuff.

I standardized it to include location (city), operating system (2k or xp at the time), and a machine ID number, and stuck a label on all the machines as time permitted so that someone being helped remotely could read the label.

Hyper-Me

qcomer wrote: »

I work for a school district of 1500+ computers, and like 15 servers or so.

We have decided to go virtual for our servers and are redoing our whole network.

Servers will be the function (ie, abc-dc1, abc-dc1, exchange, aeries, etc).

desktops/laptops will be...

Classrom: 3 digit site-RM###-WORKSTATION (so, ABC-RM102-01),
Teacher: 3 digit site-RM###-first initiallastname (so, ABC-RM101-jdoe)
Office/admin: 3 digit site-first initial last name( so, ABC-jdoe)

If their last name is longer than NETBIOS will allow, we shorten it. This helps us know that we will be using remote support (bomgar)/RDP, scripting.

Switches/Routers will be...

Site-location-fuction (so, ABC-LIB-MDF, ABC-RM102-IDF, ABC-LIB-GATEWAY)

We are building a new OU structure, IP structure, everything from the ground up.

This is basically how the naming convention was done at the school district I worked for.

Out of all their ignorant decisions, they actually had a sound naming convention. Considering it was nearly 100 sites and 25,000 machines it was a decent feat.

RobertKaucher

MentholMoose wrote: »

I standardized it to include location (city), operating system (2k or xp at the time), and a machine ID number, and stuck a label on all the machines as time permitted so that someone being helped remotely could read the label.

Since this is a recurring theme in this thread I just wanted to mention that LANSweeper has a great feature that allows you to just type in the user name and find which PC they are currently logged in to. I love this feature as we have a ton of stairs where I work. Just type the person's name or user name and then click the PC name, then click the VNC icon.

keenon

One place I worked had Star Trek names for the servers..

NightShade03

We don't use a naming convention at all at my current job so everything is named whatever the people who are on them name them, what the old techs name them, etc...

To combat the remote support problem, I have bginfo.exe set as a domain wide policy that embeds their ip address and hostname to the desktop, so knowing their computer name isn't a problem they can read it straight from the desktop.

veritas_libertas

I'm surprised by the people that are:

1. Actually telling what their naming convention is.
2. at a company that doesn't use one.

I'm glad my company has a good naming convention for our network. Makes life so much easier when everyone has the same battle plan.

forkvoid

veritas_libertas wrote: »

I'm surprised by the people that are:

1. Actually telling what their naming convention is.

Why is that surprising?

veritas_libertas

forkvoid wrote: »

Why is that surprising?

I wasn't really referring to the, "oh I use star-trek, etc." I was more referring to I use asset tag + this to equal a specific asset. That would be highly useful for me if I wanted to find infiltrate a corporation. Much less has been used to do that. Granted I would also need to know who you are plus where you work.