Hi there, we brainstormed alot about this topic some time ago, following some conclusions: - anything trademarked might be a problem (so Zoidberg might be cool for a router, but I couldn't take a router named Zapp for serious, and "Farnsworth is going mad" would be considered as normal operation ;-)) - anything just existing in a limited number will be a problem (the mentioned presidents of the US of A might not follow a fast as needed by network growth, same applies to grape varieties, planets and similar) - anything which may be regarded as discriminating like female names might be a problem (while "Sharra" is a beautiful name for a router, at least if you like George R. R. Martin) - anything vendor or model related is a bad idea in case of replacements So, what remains? Stars [astr.] are an option. There are enough of them, they are neither trademarked nor discriminating, there are even enough with quite short and simple names. Further, we wanted device type and location to be encoded. So we ended up with something like xe-0-0-0.cr-polaris.fra1.hosteurope.de, xe-0-1-0.cr-pollux.cgn3.hosteurope.de or ae0-v12.cs-slave.r2.cgn3.hosteurope.de Since Core Switches always are operated as redundant pairs, the are named master/slave, as they work as those per data centre room. Of course, we could have just chosen "cr-$number", but at least a little bit of "colour" should be allowed in such a digital world like ours ;-) Kind regards, .m -- Malte von dem Hagen Teamleitung Network Engineering & Operation Abteilung Technik ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Host Europe GmbH - http://www.hosteurope.de Welserstraße 14 - 51149 Köln - Germany Telefon: 0800 467 8387 - Fax: +49 180 5 66 3233 (*) HRB 28495 Amtsgericht Köln - USt-IdNr.: DE187370678 Geschäftsführer: Uwe Braun - Alex Collins - Mark Joseph - Patrick Pulvermüller (*) 0,14 EUR/Min. aus dem dt. Festnetz; maximal 0,42 EUR/Min. aus den dt. Mobilfunknetzen