At Loss for Words

A scheme to rule them all

To design a new scheme I gathered following few requirements, usability observations, NetBIOS limitations and just notes:

• Realize that the purpose of a computer name is to describe the computer. Current user (of a workstation) or current purpose (of a server) can be entered as a comment.
• Limit of the name is 15 letters or numbers, the only separator is dash, and that is all we have.
• The name must describe the computer no matter where it gets moved or who is using it.
• When sorted alphabetically the names should, at least partially, group together.
• The name should be concise, very concise. Because even with three characters you can name thousands of computers.
• And sadly for us, because of accounting and paperwork, the old planet/star/galaxy name needs to still be part of our new name.

Prefix

First, you need to have a prefix. For a larger company, you will most likely prefix by purpose of the computer, and append its dedicated location i.e. building or floor code. For smaller venture, where computers change their purpose and location often, you choose prefix by the appearance of the machine. And only if the computer is expected to retain its function forever, typically core servers, the prefix gets extended by few letters to describe that function.

Next interesting thing to realize and to exploit is that computers tend to be being bought in bursts rather than ad hoc. As such they have usually identical casing. Since we are already naming by appearance, we append single (or more if really really necessary) digit for a serie. Computers with the same serie number will thus look alike.

The following list of prefixes is the best I could come up with, so far:

• B: Barebone, small office computer, running MS Office or a screensaver most of the time
• C: Compact computer, Minitower
• D: Desktop computer, only for computers laying under monitors
• M: Mininotebook, netbook, whatever you want to call them
• N: Notebook, 13,3" and larger; it depends, but usually those that you can actually work on
• O: Old computer, white (-ish) colored cases only
• T: Big Tower computers, lots of RAM and GHz, still workstations not servers
• W: Workstation, Miditower, the most common type of computer

• S: Server, located in server room, tower of any size
• R: Rackmount server

This may seem to be a little too concise and strict, when you have probably seen workstations having WS prefix or servers having SRV prefix, but is that really necessary? It could only help with the grouping in sorted list (directory listing) while it adds no particular information.

Servers

The rules for server computers can and will probably differ. For larger server rooms, you might want to add a number or a letter, to describe a rack cabinet that given server resides in. And then typically the few letters for the purpose. Following are few common variants:

• DC: Domain Controller; might not need a name at all
• WEB, WWW or IS: Internet server, HTTP server; often a FTP or E-mail server too
• EML, MSX or EM, MS: E-mail server
• FTP or FS: FTP server or File server; not necessary the same in this case
• SQL or DB: Database server
• PRN or PR: Print server

Numbering workstations

Yes, servers can do well being named just R1WEB or S1SQL, but workstations do require some sort of a serial number since there is, of course, more than one of them.

First, people usually settle with simple incremental numbering. Starting with 1 or 001, and ending the line somewhere around 17 having another dozen of machines numbered 49, 50, 51, 77, 88, 99 and alike. This will happen. Because administrator assigning the number was too lazy to look out the current largest number, because the place where this number is documented was out of date, because the information get lost and not all computers are turned on to check Network Neighborhood, because of many other reasons.

Unfortunately no numbering is fool-proof here. What surprisingly turned out to be reasonably good was to use last two (or three) bytes of computer's primary LAN's MAC address. Encoded as 4 (respectively 6) hexadecimal characters, of course. This address is a property of the computer that will never change, the network adapter is hardwired on a motherboard and you can simply find that computer's IP address by running "arp -a" command.

Separators and legacy names

Working mostly with Windows-based workstations and servers, the only separator allowed is the - (a dash character). It is often discouraged to use because of compatibility issues. But I haven't experienced any problem while using it, so I'll happily separate each component of the name by dash, getting following nice computer names. Or maybe I should say computer identifiers.

I made the decision to use a separator because we need to retain the old planet/star/galaxy name at the end of the new name. With the separator, the name suddenly turns from unreadable mess of characters to pretty readable identifier. Otherwise it is purely question of your taste, but keep in mind that if you break the scheme with separators, you will end up with really ugly machine listings.

Result

Is there really a need to show some results? With servers named S1-DC-DRSON, S1-WEB-JASON, S1-SQL-DB2, S1-APP-NEPTUN and S1-BAK-OBERON ...yeah I know, it is sad that we don't have any racks with servers. I would really like to see rack-mount servers with names R1A-NNN-THIS for servers in rack A and R1B-NNN-THAT for servers in rack B, but that is not going to happen any time soon. But man can dream, can't he? ;-)

Workstation computers names got pretty straightforward, like B1-A1B2-PHOBOS, O1-E737-SATURN or W1-99A1-JUPITER. Notebooks just have the N letter. Everything is simple ...but one thing: I still have to decide how to shorten the name of my computer since T1-FE29-PROCLARUSH is too long.