Search results
- Before developing a naming convention, consider how you use servers or how they come into your workflow. Examine what you or your teammates would want to know from these names at a glance. It's not the same naming a web server, a database server ftp or a mail server DNS.
People also ask
How do I choose a server naming template?
What are server naming conventions?
What should a server naming scheme look like?
Why is it important to have a proper server naming scheme?
Can a server name be confusing?
How do I come up with a host naming convention?
Apr 16, 2024 · When developing a server naming scheme, it's important to balance conciseness, informativeness, and scalability. The ideal convention will be tailored to the specific needs of the organization, incorporating relevant details like server function, location, and environment.
- A Records
- CNAME Records
- Special Cases
- DNS Configuration
- Capacity
- Tips & Tricks
- Conclusion
To start off, name each host (via the appropriate method for your operating system) and set its DNSA record to a randomly chosen word pulled from a list: There are many pools of words to choose from, but the specific word list we recommend comes from Oren Tirosh’s mnemonic encodingproject. These 1633 words were chosen very specifically to be short ...
Next, assign one or more DNS CNAME records to cover useful functional details about the machine such as geography, environment, work department, purpose, and so on. This is all information that will be mirrored in your CMDBand easily referenced. The CNAME records are what developers should know and use for interconnecting services. Keeping the stru...
Networking and Power Equipment
For networking and power equipment, the hardware dictates the purpose and it’s not likely that you can just move them without reconfiguration. Knowing that, ignore the random word naming convention and use functional abbreviations for the DNS A record itself: 1. con – Console/Terminal Server 2. fwl – Firewall 3. lbl – Load Balancer (physical) 4. rtr – L3 Router 5. swt – L2 Switch 6. vpn – VPN Gateway 1. pdu – Power Distribution Unit 2. ups – Uninterruptible Power Supply …you’ll probably want...
Secondary and Virtual IP Addresses
The tricky part with secondary and virtual IPs (used for high availability, web services, network migrations, VLANtagged traffic, etc.) are that they might be floating and not tied to a specific piece of hardware. That being the case, it’s easiest to just assign the functional name directly to the DNS A record and follow the normal naming convention.
Mail and Name Servers
For your mail and name servers, you have to utilize DNS A records since MX and NSrecords must never point to a CNAME alias. That said, you can have more than one DNS A record, so stick with the regular scheme and add something else for the public MX and NS records to utilize.
Since we used proper DNS subdomains for each unit of data, we can set the search domains on each host to only pay attention to their own local category of machines: This makes it convenient when working on the machines, as you can use the shorter version of hostnames to, for instance, ping sql01 rather than having to type in the full ping sql01.prd...
This naming scheme will easily support 1500+ global servers. If you have more servers than that, you could add in the geography portion for the random names and then reuse words from the list. The downside being that crimson.nyc.example.com might have a completely different purpose than crimson.pdx.example.com, so there’s a bit of a mental barrier....
You should remove potentially confusing words like ’email’ from the mnemonic encoding word list if it’s technical jargon for your environment.Keep the purpose abbreviations consistent in length and always have the serial number padding match (i.e. don’t have 01 some places and just 1 in others, always use the longer 01for everything).The actual purpose abbreviations you use aren’t important, just pick a scheme, make sure it’s documented, and stick to it.It’s easiest to keep the purpose abbreviations somewhat generalized, as more detailed information can be pulled from your CMDB.Our server naming scheme lowers the mental effort required to keep track of machines and makes connecting services and maintaining proper hardware records straightforward. The aspects of a machine that are likely to change over time are contained only within the CNAME records. That means if a server dies, you don’t have to go and update all referen...
Feb 18, 2014 · Effective naming conventions should be both practical and scalable; Avoid theme based host naming conventions; The goal should be a standard naming convention for all infrastructure devices (i.e. hostnames) across the organization; Establish a basic set of criteria to define what information your hostnames must include
Finally, decide on a server naming template – one that can be used across your whole company, on all of your servers. This will make sure that every time you add a new server, there’s a proper process in place to take care of naming it.
Nov 7, 2006 · A proper naming convention can help troubleshooting as well as inventory. Here are some tips about how to create a good naming convention for your network.
It's better to have a solid naming convention set up than it is to run out of Greek gods when your business starts to bloom. In this design process, you'll create your own naming conventions for your IT assets that is scalable, readable, standardized and flexible. To illustrate, here are some diagrams of example naming conventions.
Your naming convention should be able to unambigiously name all existing devices and give an user a rough idea of what the host does. Be sure to leave enough room for growth to adapt to future developments, so that you don't need to throw your naming convention over board in a few months.
