Network Naming Conventions

Steven Champeon schampeo at hesketh.com
Mon Mar 22 20:42:24 UTC 2010


Sorry for the delay; I've been traveling and neglecting my lists.

on Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 10:47:28AM -0500, Paul Stewart wrote:
> With many changes going on this year in our network, I figured it's a
> good time to revisit our naming conventions used in our networks.

I study PTR naming conventions as part of my Enemieslist project; it
turns out that genericity in naming is highly correlated to bot spam,
so some folks find my patterns useful to block and/or score inbound
mail for risk of being bot-originated. 

As such, I've written a few rants about /poor/ naming practices that
you may find useful and/or amusing, as well as a few pointing out the
rare /good/ naming practices. (See below)

In a nutshell, it boils down to this:

 - note static/dynamic hosts in the name, in the furthest-right-hand
   token possible (dyn.example.net, not dyn-foo-1-2-3-4.ny.ny.example.net). 

 - cute and funny are not useful to others trying to decide whether
   to block services originating from a host; clarity and forethought
   and transparency are. 

 - use different conventions for different services, this helps us
   differentiate dialup from dsl from cable and other infrastructure;
   don't assume everyone will do a whois lookup to find out this block
   is all consumer dsl and this other one is fixed business class.

 - be consistent, for the love of all that is good and holy. I've got
   over a hundred patterns for vsnl.net.in *alone*.

There are a couple of IDs that discuss naming, in the anti-abuse context:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-reverse-mapping-considerations-06
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-msullivan-dnsop-generic-naming-schemes-00.txt

Here's what I've had to say on the matter over the years:

DHCP doesn't necessarily mean dynamic
http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/09/dhcp_doesnt_nec.html

annoying-stupidity.volia.net
http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/08/annoyingstupidi.html

A few thoughts on reverse DNS / PTR naming
http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/a_few_thoughts_1.html

Basic principles of DNS and their discontents
http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/basic_principle.html
http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/basic_principle_1.html
http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/basic_principle_2.html

Today's DNS Spotlight: Eircom
http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/todays_dns_spot.html

A couple more: kudos, and mixed kudos/gripe
http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/a_couple_more_k.html

Principles
http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/principles.html

There's a few dozen more in the gripes archive:
http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/gripes/

HTH,
Steve

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