Labeling and naming

Jon Stanley nanog at rmrf.net
Thu Jan 25 08:02:36 UTC 2001


Here is how we at SAVVIS name our devices -

1)	Two letter country designation
2)	Four letter telco city identifier
3)	A single digit that indicates the facility within that city

Then it diverges for various functions.  For example, for our Lucent
switches, there is a period, followed by aa, which indicates a CBX-500, af
which indicates a B-STDX 9000, or ag, which indicates a Gx-550.

For routers, it is a hyphen, followed by a convention for the model of the
router, then the function of the router (almost always c as our edge is
also our core)

For example, there is a circuit going between Columbus and Chicago.  It
hits:

usclmb1.aa (CBX-500 in Columbus, OH)
uschcg2.ag (GX-550 taking a long-haul OC12 from Columbus and an OC12
going to the Juniper)
uschcg2-j20c (Juniper M20 in Chicago)

For a Cisco router - it would be uschcg3-c75c (that device actually
exsists too, it's at another location in Chicago) - the 75 indicates it's
a 7513.

On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, Przemyslaw Karwasiecki wrote:

> 
> Hello,
> 
> We are currently trying to resolve the very same issue.
> So far we plan to use following scheme:
> 
> 1) Device name should be concatenation of following parts:
> 
>    <2 letters of ISO country code>   
>       http://www.bcpl.net/~jspath/isocodes.html
>    <3 letters of airport city code>
>       http://www.ufreight.com/faq/airport_code/airport_code_by_ac.html
>    <3 letters of location>
>       to be created
>    <4 letters of device name abbreviations>
>       to be created -- in case of cisco: model number
>    <1 letter separator>
>       arbitrary decided to be capital letter X (no DNS nor arithmetic exp problems)
>    <1 letter device ordinal>
>       can be hex if needed
> 
>    Examples:
>      USMIANOC3662X1 - Miami Lakes NOC cisco 3662 
>      USMIATPL7206X1 - Miami Teleplace cisco 7206
>      USMIANAPJM20X1 - Miami NAP Juniper M20
>      VEBRMPOP2501X1 - Venezuela, Barquisimento POP, VE cisco 2501
>      VACCSCTV1010X1 - Venezuela, Caracas CANTV collocation, cisco Lightstream 1010
> 
> 2) We will also create DNS zone ???core.net which will be used in two main ways:
> 
>    a) reverse DNS lookup, to map IP addresses into hierarchical names, like:
>       serial1-0-0-128-<customer_name>.USMIATPL3662X1.TelePlace.mia.us.ifxcore.net
>       This will be mainly used for tools like traceroute, etc.
> 
>    b) straight DNS lookups of devices itself, like:
>       USMIATPL3662X1.ifxcore.net
>       This will be used to get easy access to a device itself (through Loopback),
>       and due to mnemonic nature of device name should be easy to memorize.
> 
> So far the only problem we run into with this scheme is 12 character limit
> on hostnames on some boxes.
> 
> Przemek
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
> Kurt Erik Lindqvist
> Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 9:21 AM
> To: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Labeling and naming
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> For a project I am currently working on I stumbled upon the following.
> What is the best way to lable and name equipment? Although this applies to
> all equipment such as SDH ADMs, IP, ATM etc I realised that it seems to be
> hardest to find a sensible convention for IP equipment. Preferably I would
> like to find a convention that fits all, but I guess that is utopia.
> 
> So, since list contains, PTTs, Telcos, ISPs and wannabees is there any
> good common scheme or pointers to something useful?
> 
> - kurtis -
> 
> 
> 





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