• FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    My dad was never at university, but he was a unix admin for ages. his naming conventions for clusters?

    Star Wars characters.
    Red Dwarf Characters.
    Star trek characters.
    Asimov’s robots.
    and apparently, his annoying bosses. (For the troublesome clusters.)

    • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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      10 months ago

      I’ve heard it’s a “pets vs cattle” thing. When you have a small fleet of distinct servers, you name them. When you have a thousand interchangeable boxes, you give them systematic IDs.

      Or you scale up to a franchise with a large enough cast. I wonder if anyone uses One Piece character names for servers?

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        It kind of also depends on how you interact with them- some clusters are interacted with by admin as a single entity; those got names even if they technically represented lots of rackspace; or the hardware that’s running specific groupings of services.

        Like a databases. (Darth Vader was reserved for databases that logged and tracked errors… aka other systems that were, uh, rebellions.)

        • XTL@sopuli.xyz
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          10 months ago

          You give systematic id’s to completely interchangable things. You give unique names to unique things.

          If you name a formal thing (like a physical computer) by its function you have failed at naming. And are probably a manager who doesn’t see that one day you’ll need many things of almost the same function and to tell them apart. Or that one thing will have many functions.

      • send_me_your_ink@lemmynsfw.com
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        9 months ago

        To anyone reading this and not getting it. When your pet gets sick you take care of it (named special servers/other machines). When a cow in the feed lot gets sick you…replace it.