Science Memes

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puns (mander.xyz)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

My dad was never at university, but he was a unix admin for ages. his naming conventions for clusters?

Star Wars characters.
Red Dwarf Characters.
Star trek characters.
Asimov's robots.
and apparently, his annoying bosses. (For the troublesome clusters.)

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I've heard it's a "pets vs cattle" thing. When you have a small fleet of distinct servers, you name them. When you have a thousand interchangeable boxes, you give them systematic IDs.

Or you scale up to a franchise with a large enough cast. I wonder if anyone uses One Piece character names for servers?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It kind of also depends on how you interact with them- some clusters are interacted with by admin as a single entity; those got names even if they technically represented lots of rackspace; or the hardware that's running specific groupings of services.

Like a databases. (Darth Vader was reserved for databases that logged and tracked errors.... aka other systems that were, uh, rebellions.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You give systematic id's to completely interchangable things. You give unique names to unique things.

If you name a formal thing (like a physical computer) by its function you have failed at naming. And are probably a manager who doesn't see that one day you'll need many things of almost the same function and to tell them apart. Or that one thing will have many functions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

username checks out

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

To anyone reading this and not getting it. When your pet gets sick you take care of it (named special servers/other machines). When a cow in the feed lot gets sick you...replace it.