One word... BEER. McEwans Tennants John Courage ...you get the picture. -TY "Give beer to those who are perishing..." (Proverbs 31:6) -----Original Message----- From: Patrick Evans [mailto:pre@pre.org] Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2000 5:35 AM To: Patrick Greenwell Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: SERVER NAMES On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Patrick Greenwell wrote:

Not picking on you in particular, but isn't one of the greatest advantages to having DNS to offer *meaningful* names to machines(assuming anything other than a home network?)

It's nice to be able to go in to a company and see machines named "www1, www2, mx1, mx2" etc. which offer some indication as to their purpose rather than "maverick, foozlebutt, blarg", etc. which offers no such indication. I know it isn't as fun, but it certainly seems to be much more useful (IMO of course...)

On our network we use "proper hostnames" for the machines and their base addresses, and then associate mundane things like 'www' or 'ns0' as logical interfaces - means we can swing a service from one machine to another without needing to mess with base addresses. As for what those proper hostnames are, historically we've used Pooh characters (tigger being the company's first server, because he who put it together wasn't entirely sure it wouldn't bounce regularly). We ran out of those a while back, so new internal servers are being named after muppets, office workstations are based after underground stations (guess who got cockfosters for an NT box), and the mail servers I'm putting together at the moment are named after appropriate chocolate bars (flake, timeout and so on...) One of our competitors seems to have servers named after cigarette brands, which was rather novel. There are few pleasures in day to day sysadmin/netadmin work, no reason to give up the chance to use original hostnames...original not applying to gods, chemical elements and the like! -- Patrick Evans - Sysadmin, bran addict and couch potato pre at pre dot org www.pre.org/pre