Re: Machine naming convention

[Sean Kamath <kamath@pogo.wv.tek.com>]

[In a message on Thu, 06 Aug 1998 00:27:32 EDT,
	"John Sellens" wrote:]
>You might want to have a look at RFC1178 "Choosing a Name for
>Your Computer" by Don Libes.
>
>My two cents: if you're naming random desktop boxes that don't
>act as servers (PCs, X-terminals, small UNIX boxes), use simple
>ugly names like pc01, pc02, xterm01, xterm02, since the only
>people that should ever need to know the names are administrators.

Well, er, no.

The only other people that need to know the ugly names like pc01 and
xterm01 are the the poor folks who log in to other machines to run
large jobs and display the results on their ugly-named boxes.

Frankly, people suck at remembering the difference between pc01 and
pc02, but can readily recall who has batman, and who has robin.

If I had my drothers, I would remove every crappy-named box ever in
existance.  If you *REALLY* think that administrators can more readily
remember that it was sun045 that had the bad drive last week, well,
ok, glad I'm not there.  And I understand the belief that it's easier
to figure out what something is if the name reflects that.  But thats
why we have a database.  Sheesh, it can be a flat file, an NIS map, a
DBM file, or an Oracle database.  Why not?  You can keep other info
with it as well.  It's better than naming the box

     sgi42-b88-x14-64-62-frank

;-)

Sean