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Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:53:59 -0400
Message-ID: <AANLkTik2w=LY2JKCHJKTDBwj0_MUajaATHQt5uQcFeYR@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Quick Poll: Server names
From: Edward Capriolo <edlinuxguru@gmail.com>
To: user@cassandra.apache.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:49 AM, uncle mantis <unclemantis@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah S**T! The Pooh server is is down again! =)
>
> What does one do if they run out of themed names?
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Brett Thomas <brettpthomas@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I like names of colleges
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:40 AM, Dave Viner <daveviner@pobox.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I've seen & used several...
>>> names of children of employees of the company
>>> names of streets near office
>>> names of diseases (lead to very hard to spell names after a while, but
>>> was quite educational for most developers)
>>> names of characters from famous books (e.g., lord of the rings, asimov
>>> novels, etc)
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 7:54 AM, uncle mantis <unclemantis@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I will be naming my servers after insect family names. What do you all
>>>> use for yours?
>>>>
>>>> If this is something that is too off topic please contact a moderator.
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>>
>>>> Michael
>>>
>>
>
>

I know this is a fun thread, and I hate being a "debby downer"
but...In my opinion, naming servers after anything then their function
is not a great idea. Lets look at some positives and negatives:

System1:
cassandra01
cassandra02
cassandra03

VS

System2:
tom
dick
harry

Forward and reverse DNS:

System1 is easy to mange with the server number you can easily figure
out an offset.
System2 requires careful mapping and will be more error prone.

The future:
So way back when a company i was at used Native American tribe names.
Guess what happened. At about 20 nodes we ran out of common names like
Cherokee, and we had servers named choctaw. These names become hard to
spell and hard to say. Once you run out of native American names and
you start using 'country names' What is the point? It is not even a
convention any more. Cassandra servers are named after Native
Americans, or possible food, or possibly a dog.

Quick someone... fido just went down? What does fido do? Is it
important? Is it in our web cluster or are cassandra cluster?

Someone about mentioned Chevron1 till Chevron9. Look then ran out of
unique names after the 5th server. So essentially 5 unique fun names
then chevron6-1000.  Why is chevron6-1000 better then cassandra6-1000
and is it any more fun?

Reboots:
Have you ever called a data center at 1AM for a server reboot? Picking
a fancy, non phonetic name is a great way for a tired NOC operator to
reboot the wrong one.