Hello, We are currently trying to resolve the very same issue. So far we plan to use following scheme: 1) Device name should be concatenation of following parts: <2 letters of ISO country code> http://www.bcpl.net/~jspath/isocodes.html <3 letters of airport city code> http://www.ufreight.com/faq/airport_code/airport_code_by_ac.html <3 letters of location> to be created <4 letters of device name abbreviations> to be created -- in case of cisco: model number <1 letter separator> arbitrary decided to be capital letter X (no DNS nor arithmetic exp problems) <1 letter device ordinal> can be hex if needed Examples: USMIANOC3662X1 - Miami Lakes NOC cisco 3662 USMIATPL7206X1 - Miami Teleplace cisco 7206 USMIANAPJM20X1 - Miami NAP Juniper M20 VEBRMPOP2501X1 - Venezuela, Barquisimento POP, VE cisco 2501 VACCSCTV1010X1 - Venezuela, Caracas CANTV collocation, cisco Lightstream 1010 2) We will also create DNS zone ???core.net which will be used in two main ways: a) reverse DNS lookup, to map IP addresses into hierarchical names, like: serial1-0-0-128-<customer_name>.USMIATPL3662X1.TelePlace.mia.us.ifxcore.net This will be mainly used for tools like traceroute, etc. b) straight DNS lookups of devices itself, like: USMIATPL3662X1.ifxcore.net This will be used to get easy access to a device itself (through Loopback), and due to mnemonic nature of device name should be easy to memorize. So far the only problem we run into with this scheme is 12 character limit on hostnames on some boxes. Przemek -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Kurt Erik Lindqvist Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 9:21 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Labeling and naming For a project I am currently working on I stumbled upon the following. What is the best way to lable and name equipment? Although this applies to all equipment such as SDH ADMs, IP, ATM etc I realised that it seems to be hardest to find a sensible convention for IP equipment. Preferably I would like to find a convention that fits all, but I guess that is utopia. So, since list contains, PTTs, Telcos, ISPs and wannabees is there any good common scheme or pointers to something useful? - kurtis -