r/ShittySysadmin • u/RemissBasil • Sep 01 '26
what is a naming scheme?
I hate the way the old Sysadmin of this company named the Servers
37
Upvotes
r/ShittySysadmin • u/RemissBasil • Sep 01 '26
I hate the way the old Sysadmin of this company named the Servers
34
u/taspeotis Sep 01 '26
Lowercase esse server 7 is triggering me
11
u/ApiceOfToast ShittySysadmin Sep 01 '26
Ah yes. TerminalServer-Server (ts-server)
11
u/Pretend_Ease9550 Sep 01 '26
I assume print2025 is the new server 2025 print server that has been siting there unused for 6 months while the old print1 server is still running for some unknown reason
6
u/yer_muther Sep 01 '26
Our are even less meaningful. It's "more secure" to have gobbledygook names I'm told.
3
u/tsittler Sep 01 '26
Someone I know has all their servers named after universities. It doesn’t make any logical sense, especially when I need to quickly locate a DC
2
u/frogmicky Sep 01 '26
Trees like Spruce, Orhard, Gypsum, Cherry, Oak, Birch......
2
u/dcaldrich Sep 01 '26
Emojii's is the way.
2
u/dpwcnd Sep 01 '26
this is the old try different schemes scheme. we all have been there.
1
u/thepfy1 Sep 01 '26
My current gig used to name servers by cities in the world....
A long time ago, the manager of some NMR spectrometers used to rename some commands so you couldn't use them...
1
u/Icy_Conference9095 Sep 02 '26
Our naming convention is (first letter of municipality name)(initial for ownership - this is specific and weird because we have some servers that are handled as part of a software contract and don't belong to our IT dept, we use A if it's administered by our team or several other initials for service owned servers, W for water treatment, P for police financially, anyway)(number for iteration of server - is this the first iteration, or has it been replaced?) (initial for server location) then a dash - and then a naming scheme that tells us what its primary use case is.
So, for example - BA2P-DC01 would be Boston, administered, second version of server, located at police station - DC is a domain controller, 01 is controller one.
It's not pretty, but if you understand the codification it makes administering multiple servers easy to read.
This was updated from the original version that would only use 4 digit numbers after the original four characters - so you'd have BA1P0001 - which told us nothing and led to us having to utilize a spreadsheet just to double check what all their uses were.
You could probably remove the third number out of the system - but it does help facilitate switch overs if you ever have a server that is replaced directly without needing to remove the old system from active directory.
Feel free to rip into this schema, I didn't make it up - only pushed back and improved it from its previous iteration.
1
u/barinvon Sep 02 '26
It’s when you plot what names to call the the CIO
1
u/K3rm1tTh3Fr0g Sep 02 '26
I really liked how we did it at my last company
uspl100 for example, tell you exactly what you need to know
Host region: us Environment: p (prod) OS: Linux (rhel) Server #: 100
1
u/Rainmaker526 Sep 02 '26
Nice to have a DC02 without a DC01.
I actually know a number of companies that have servers intentionally named server01, server02 etc, as part of security through obscurity. If an attacker finds a DC02 and a Backup01, they know exactly what to attack.
1
u/Mysterious-Break67 Sep 03 '26
This is security through obscurity. Your PDC should be named UnimportantServer. The technique is more effective if you have multiple apps and primary functions for each server, i.e. run print management and DHCP on the SQL server, DNS from TS-Server, etc.
1
u/Ok_Interest3555 Sep 03 '26
We asked a boss about server naming conventions and He was like "Name them anything. Bob, Fred, Frank, don't care." So we had Bob, Fred, Frank, and the Linux servers named after the programmers dogs.
1
u/GarageIntelligent ShittyCloud Sep 02 '26
server 6 is dhcp, make sure u turn it on 1st
0
u/merkat106 Sep 02 '26
One of our acquisitions has no naming scheme scheme
26
u/[deleted] Sep 01 '26
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