[Cialug] DNS Naming: Servers, Services, Etc

[Todd Walton]

On server naming... I read an article once about server naming that made a
lot of sense to me, but I cannot find it now. Alas.

The person said that at his place of work they name all the servers
something essentially random. Or at least meaningless. But then they have
meaningful names for services, and those names would point to either one of
the servers or to a load balancer with servers behind it, or whatever.
There was some degree of subdomain-ing, where geographically separated
datacenters had their own subdomain, and other names -- server or service,
meaningless or meaningful -- would go into those subdomains. So a FQDN for
a server wouldn't be *entirely* meaningless, but almost. Anyway, I wish I
could find that again, just to see someone else's thinking on the
separation of servers and services. I'd like to do something similar.

I think personally I would like to see naming be in layers:

My servers would not have meaningless names like the article I'm
remembering, but instead would have dense names with a bit of meaning in
them. The datacenter it's in, environment, app it's part of, its role in
that app, and an iteration. Like, dsm-dev-mail-web-01, but without the
dashes. Come up with a standard list of location, environment, and role
codes. It could be in a different order, like dev-mail-web-01-dsm. That
looks kind of dumb, but my point is that the name should be something like
that. I know this is highly opinion-based. This only represents my opinion
for my systems. Maybe you put the installed product into your names. Go
wild. But servers should have *some* kind of unique name, obviously, and my
hunch is that you're better off the more standardized and fairly generic
you make them.

And then there should be service names that look like app/service name,
role, environment, and "svc" or similar. Like uat-mail-web-svc or the like.
Or maybe svc is a subdomain of your primary domain, and then you have your
name within that.

And then a final layer that is "official" customer-facing URL hostnames. "
www.example.com", "drive.example.com", etc.

It seems like if you really look at your DNS and figure out what's going on
with it, you end up with these layers of meaning in it. Also my place of
work has their-name.com and their-name.net, and I've been wondering if we
should try to put layers one and two solely in .net and use .com only for
"official" customer-facing URLs. It's kind of mixed up at the moment. But
I'm not sure how much I care about that. It's just a pain when you have to
lookup whether a certain name is in .com or .net, that's all. I'm not sure
how worth it it would be to try to straighten that out now.

Anyway, thoughts?

--
Todd