This is pretty clever. Reminds me of an article a few years ago about printer names -- YouTube named theirs after Wu-Tang members; Google, after Transformers:
Regrettably, I must report that at Blizzard, printers have boring but functional names. And even though the campus is laid out with three buildings positioned similarly to the current WoW map, they're merely Buildings 1, 2, and 3. At least the meeting rooms all have lore names, however.
That's actually depressingly boring for one of the worlds most recognizable games companies.
It makes me feel like throwing out my lucky charms and eat cheerios for breakfast. (FYI I'm in my 20's, but shitty North America doesn't have good breakfast cereals like the UK)
I think this is enough for me to switch from protoss to zerg. Just the idea that I'm playing a Mac race is going to affect my psyche enough for me to stay in bronze forever ;p
Sounds fun if you do it for your home network, but profesionally you'll quickly appreciate embracing a more dull pattern of calling database machines db01, db02, etc, preproduction machines preprod01, preprod02, etc. And the sysadmin that will come after you will appreciate it even more.
Which falls over when db01 ain't a database machine anymore.
When I ran a large network, machines didn't physically move very much (at least, far less often than their logical functions changed); we had a naming scheme based on datacenter code, rack ID and rack position:
sjc02-X0501-19
would be the machine in sjc02, rack X05.01, unit 19.
Far more important than the actual scheme you use is consistency. Pick one scheme and stick with it. Easier when you pick the right scheme the first time. :)
That's great for SA's who are working in the racks.
Not so great for SA's that are administering the boxes remotely, devs trying to figure out what machine they are on, or teams trying to troubleshoot an issue.
If a box is no longer a db machine, just rename it to something descriptive.
That's nice if you never repurpose a machine - so it makes plenty of sense for naming VMs. I've found it better to use arbitrary names for physical machines, though. Thanks to the prevalence of pop-culture fandoms on the internet it's pretty easy to find a list of names related to just about any theme you might desire, then when you get a machine you can just pop the next name from the list.
We (correction, I) keep dual names on all our machines. First the descriptive name lb01, websrv01, db01, etc. The second is the informal name all based on constellations and other space based entities like earth, star, taurus, corvus, leo, etc. Via Puppet[1], the MOTD of each server is generated with figlet[2] and other information so that the machine can be identified using all of it's names.
Most likely it's overkill - but I do like my pretty names as well.
I'm sure CloudFlare uses "boring" names internally, but I was kind of nicely surprised that their DNS nameservers are named amy.cloudflare.com, paul.cloudflare.com, etc.
For some reason it just gave me a little tiny bit of excitement to get started on their service that wouldn't have been there if they were named the standard ns1., ns2., etc., and when you're just choosing from a random pool of DNS servers it doesn't really matter what the names are from an organization standpoint.
Glad you like the non-boring names for nameservers. There's actually method to why we use them and not boring names. There are 101 of names (50 women, 51 men) all between 2 - 4 letters long (Ed, Sara, John, etc.). They actually map to globally distributed clusters of servers, so each name doesn't correspond to a physical server in a single location. Instead of mapping to a physical server, we use the unique names to help verify you are the true owner of a domain you sign up in a way that is similar to how Google Apps uses a TXT record you add to your DNS to show you own a domain.
When you sign up for CloudFlare we provide you two unique nameservers when you sign up as part of the verification process. We can tell you are the owner of the domain you're registering if you change the nameservers to the two we provide you. In that way, it adds a layer of security in case two people register the exact same domain at the same time and we can't tell who should be authoritative. We figured that it was easier to remember and not typo two names rather than two random numbers (ns23 & ns67).
We commissioned an artist to draw 101 ninjas to represent CloudFlare's "Ninja nameservers." You can read more about them on the CloudFlare blog, including links to the Facebook page with all 101 illustrations:
Yep, you are basically making a new requirement that hires have to be Starcraft experts; and if not, then your naming scheme is totally unintuitive and overly verbose.
I'm a big fan of the function###.IATA (or ICAO) code.
So like db1.pao, web3.sfo, m22.sin...
I don't do the 01 02 thing because that falls down at 99. :-)
In general I'm not sure how you could think the battle-worn/old-tech/modular visual style of the Terran race applies more to Windows than Unix.
Whereas terrifyingly-impressive testament to the brutal domination of an evolutionary niche and subsequent uncontrolled (uncontrollable?) growth seems like such a more-natural analogue for Windows.
And that's without even touching the gross, slimy, infested allusions. ;)
"Here are some examples: you might use the planets in the solar system (I would never do this; who wants to have to wait for the discovery of new planets to buy your 9th computer?)"
For this reason, I use moons of our solar system in naming external hard drives at home. Figure it will last me a little longer, and saves me having to say to my wife in front of friends "Can you put the wedding photos on x?" and "Is x now full?" for certain instances of x towards the outer reaches of the system.
I've previously gone with various fun things (the main server at my previous job was named mainframe for ages), currently it's star wars characters as a friend of mine insists. Mine are all just named for their purpose. Laptop being playworkschool, my older server is called beast (hosting a civilization 5 replay generator). I don't like the idea of StarCraft though, but perhaps i'm just not such a big fan? I remember playing the first game a lot but i'm not a huge fan.
Am I the only one who thinks that Windows, with malware, worms, and trojans, are more akin to the zerg? Whereas Linux, with its post-humanism, is akin to Terrans?
I was hoping this would be about Blizzard or battle.net, oh well. My own network machines are all named after space probes: pioneer, skylab, mercury, surveyor, gemini, apollo, voyager, etc. The university I went to (www.hsu.edu) named all their machines after trees (cyprus, pine, etc) - the school alma mater was about the pine trees that grew throughout the area, so a tree based naming scheme made sense.
Server names at my university's CS department (and at least 2 other universities I know of) are biblical characters- Matthew, Mark, John, Gabriel, Mary, Martha, etc...
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/07/the-wu-ta...
Regrettably, I must report that at Blizzard, printers have boring but functional names. And even though the campus is laid out with three buildings positioned similarly to the current WoW map, they're merely Buildings 1, 2, and 3. At least the meeting rooms all have lore names, however.