D-Mac's Stuff

The group of system administrators I worked with for over a decade had a tradition of giving Unix computers host names that followed a different theme for each cluster of computers.

We started out as students running the computer labs for the College of Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park in the late 1980s. Our first public computer lab was a dozen or so Sun 3/50 and 3/60 workstations named after Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Host names included shire, bilbo, gloin, rivendell, etc.

When the Sun 3′s became obsolete, we turned them into X terminals connecting to several Sparcstation servers, which got their own naming scheme: coke, pepsi, jolt, and mountain-dew. We could have kept adding soda names for awhile, but we didn’t need many servers for that lab.

In the staff office (the “Hackers Pitt”, with spelling from Buckaroo Banzai), the Sparcstations we got for testing and software development were called tweak, twiddle, and frob. Good thing we didn’t need to come up with any more names in that series!

Here are a couple of pictures of the Hackers Pitt. Dave, Josh, and Chris:

Kurt, Dave, and Randall:

Later, we opened up another lab, consisting of Decstations, I think. We decided to go with names of computer languages as the naming scheme, so we had workstations called basic, cobol, lisp, perl, etc. There was a networked Postscript laser printer in the lab, and someone got the bright idea to give it a name in the same scheme, so naturally it had to be called postscript! A few months later, though, we had to rename it, because some software would get confused and malfunction when encountering a printer queue called postscript.

Aerospace Engineering named their computers after airplanes. Their Sun3 server was called hellcat, a WWII fighter.

There was one department in the College of Engineering that simply numbered their workstations: Chemical Engineering, whose computers were named cm##. The student sysadmins didn’t like that scheme much, because it was hard to keep those computers straight. Their names had no memorable personalities, so we had trouble remembering whether we were supposed to do something to cm18 or cm19, or cm23 or cm32.

Within a couple of years, many of us started work at UUNET and created one of the first commercial web hosting services. We took our penchant for naming schemes with us. Here’s a picture of Josh, Chris, and Kurt in Kurt’s office at UUNET assembling some servers:

The infrastructure servers (email, rdist, backups, etc.) had names of butlers from literature: jeeves, nestor, smithers, alfred. That was a clever but very restrictive scheme. It turns out there aren’t very many well-known butlers in literature. Now there’s a Wikipedia article listing them, but at the time we were beating our heads against the wall trying to think of more.

For Kerberos (secure login) servers, the list was the most limited. The first one was called keymaster (from Ghostbusters). When we added a second one as a backup, we had to make up a name. Would it be keyslave or keyminor? Hmm, maybe that wasn’t such a great idea.

For customer web servers, we decided on a larger class of cleverly appropriate names: spider names. The first few were easy: charlotte, blackwidow, brownrecluse, tarantula, trapdoor, funnelweb. After exhausting the well-known ones, we had to get more creative or obscure: peterparker, banana, garden, huntsman, crab. Customers had to login or FTP to the machine’s name to administer their servers, and it felt a little silly to tell them their web server was hosted on, say, banana. Who actually knows there’s such a thing as a banana spider? As we got more customers, we wasted quite a bit of time researching and compiling lists of spider species so we’d have enough names for new servers we were bringing online.

It all started out as good fun, but these days I’d just call them all web001, web002, mail, etc. and be done with it. No creative naming scheme will scale to hundreds of computers.

I confess that at home, I adopted a naming scheme based on classical elements: fire, water, air, earth, and a few more inspired by that pattern. I haven’t changed it partly because the limitations of that scheme help motivate me to not keep too many computers at home.

From rcd@ico.isc.com Tue Jan 22 01:54:05 1991
From: rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: future globs (was "UNIX mindset...")
Date: 22 Jan 91 00:33:50 GMT
Followup-To: comp.unix.wizards
Organization: Interactive Systems Corporation, Boulder, CO

roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes, in response to the glob wars:

> 	Given the move towards kernel bloat, I fear that one alternative we
> might see some day is moving file name globbing into the kernel.  "Let's
> let namei do it; namei does everything!"  Blech.

Plus, namei is undoubtedly the single most hacked-over piece of code in the
entire kernel!  It was already battered ten years ago.

Nowadays, it's more complicated than that.  First, we'll need a System V
kernel globbing interface and a BSD globbing interface.  There will be new
system calls for this--setglbent() and getglbent() for Sys V, setfilename-
globbing() and getfilenameglobbing() for BSD.  Of course, they'll have
different arguments, and BSD will modify namei-globbing only for the
current process, while SysV will modify it for an entire glob-group (a
new conceptual grouping of processes).

Then, V.4 will have to provide for both mechanisms.  The selection of
globbing will be based on the file system types, a kernel examination of
the process's PATH variable, and the endian-ness of the processor in use.
Next, we'll need POSIX globbing, which will be almost like both but not
entirely compatible with either, with switches to enable more-nearly-BSD-
like and more-nearly-SysV-like behavior.

AIX will provide its own extended globbing mechanism, promising support for
BSD and POSIX globbing in a future release, anticipating OSF/3 globbing,
and also providing for eventual user-specified globbing via callback from
namei() to user code.  The first release will fail to glob a single '*'
correctly, although it will be 26% faster than any other globbing as
measured on DhryGlob 0.0.3.

A little-known patent on file name wild card expansion will be discovered
to have been granted to a now-bankrupt Oregon software company, in an
obscure paragraph of a patent originally intended for selecting add-ons to
hamburgers in a fast-food point-of-sale terminal.  The patent will have
been sold to a California paper company which consists only of lawyers,
and which will immediately start filing look-and-feel lawsuits to any
vendor which won't pay a royalty of $0.005 per globbed name.

In response, FSF will issue a dire warning about the consequences of
proprietary globbing.  Buttons saying "Keep Your Lawyers off My Globs"
will appear at the June 1991 USENIX.  An extended globbing mechanism will
be built into the next release of emacs.

OSF will announce that it has studied existing globbing mechanisms and
found them to be inadequate.  Thus, it will issue an RFT for distributed,
open, architecture-neutral globbing mechanisms which also protect vendors'
proprietary investments in unexpanded file names.  The globbing technology
will be selected by an entirely open and fair evaluation process from all
submissions received, provided only that the submitter is a large multi-
national OSF corporate member with annual revenues exceeding $10^9.
--
Dick Dunn     rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd       Boulder, CO   (303)449-2870
   ...Mr. Natural says, "Use the right tool for the job."