Network Naming Conventions

Malte von dem Hagen mvh at hosteurope.de
Mon Mar 15 16:44:20 UTC 2010


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

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