Or your ally in the fight against technology management.  Earlier this week I was given the task of doing some naming for new servers, which is pretty much SOP.  Problem is, we don’t have a naming standard.  As such, I may choose a name that annoys someone, or they choose a name that annoys me.  This becomes very political.  We don’t want to name things in such a way that they annoy people.  It’s a bad idea.  And, much to my dismay, I said something this morning that was pretty much just insulting to one of my team members.

I could have given loads of excuses, but it wouldn’t have mattered.  I was being petty.  Man, that’s a bad idea in an office.  It divides teams, and man, that’s *really* bad in an office.  The reason it came about was because a few people were talking about moving into “fun” server names, as apposed to functional server names.  Examples of this would be Cygnus or Badger, as apposed to GR-SQLCluster1.

The reasons behind it being:

• It’s more secure if the attacker doesn’t know what the server does, based on it’s name
• Server roles change over time, so GR-SQLCluster1 might become relegated to an apps server
• Sections of functional names become redundant
• Organize names by type; i.e. birds, galaxies, different words for snow, etc

At first glance, they make great sense.  However, after a little time to digest the reasons, a few things become clear.

• If an attacker is able to get to the server, to the point that they can know the name, you are already screwed
• A good practice is to rebuild the server if it changes roles, and with that change the name
• People don’t want to connect to the Badger Server
• You need a reference list to figure out what the Cygnus server does/where the Cygnus server physically is
• If you want to create DNS entries to provide functional names to it, that’s another level of complexity to manage
• What happens when you run out of server names?

Given this list, it now becomes an interesting debate.  But I have one question for you:

As a developer, would you name a variable ‘badger’ if it was holding a shopping cart?  Not a chance.  You would only do that if it were badger related, and even then you are better off with ‘meanLittleWoodlandCreature’ in case you change something.

In my response I called the security reason laughable.  Again – petty and a really, really, really bad idea when in a team discussion.  Obviously I was in a pissy mood for some reason, or maybe a greater than thou mood thinking I knew more about the topic.  I tend to do that.

I think what really made me do it was that we are developers, not administrators.  It’s not our job to name servers.  So why were we?  I didn’t want to piss anyone off, I just wanted to name the server so we could move on to the next stage of the deployment.  This situation could have easily been averted.

If we had a naming convention for our servers, regardless of fun vs functional, I could have followed the convention and washed my hands of the problem.  So I guess the question is, why don’t we have one?  Lot’s of companies don’t have them.  And I think it’s because of stagnant server growth.

If you are only setting up a couple servers every so often, you aren’t bogged down with these types of questions.  You have time to discuss.  The problem we are having, I think, is because we have increased our server growth dramatically in the last little while, which hasn’t given us enough time to discuss names as a group.  I was rushing to get the server into production because the administrators were busy working on other tasks that were filed under the category “Do Now Or ELSE!”

So I think we need a naming convention.  A functional naming convention.  It will prevent a world of hurt down the road.  Now to get buy in, and ask for forgiveness.  I still have lots to learn.