[Sysadmin] Re: DNS for new server

[David Kaufman]

William Anderson wrote:
> David A. Ulevitch wrote:
>> On Jun 20, 2004, at 10:46 PM, David Kaufman wrote:
>>
>>> can you setup an A record in the evolt.com DNS zone for:
>>> tempest.evolt.org => 67.19.100.194
>
> Is that really what we're calling it?  :)

well that's just what i called it because it had to be called something.
i always try to name machines usefully, usually using the "Themes"
recommendation referred to in http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html.
that is, my own computers are all named after movie and tv robots (hal,
max, peepo, gort, cyclon, and so on).  at work, a previous sysadmin
named machines after mythical monsters (cyclops, scylla) though this has
proven to be a limiting theme, with rampant misspelling opportunities as
most of his choices are from Ulysses, which few of us others have read,
and even fewer can spell in greek :-)  we're broadening the theme to
mythical creatures of all sorts (gargoyle, griffin, unicorn, and
whatnot).

i'm not married to it or anything -- we can certainly discuss this and
choose a new name for the machine, or choose a better theme -- i just
had to choose something so i punted.  it is certainly much easier (and
less confusing) to rename a machine sooner than later!  when i picked
tempest i was thinking of the 1980's video game, which seems to be
fairly fertile ground for machine names: digdug, centipede, pacman,
galaxian, asteroid... or if we come across a particularly simple-minded
machine, pong is quite easy to spell :-)  we'll surely run out of money
for more machines before we run out of potential names.

visitors and web users need never see this name - it is for us, the
sysadmins to refer to a box.  most "visible" machine names are named
after the services they provide mail.foo.com or ns2.bar.com, but these
should normally be additional aliases (not necessarily DNS CNAMES, they
are often additional A records), because while *services* tend to
migrate from machine to machine, machines themselves do not... services
may even be provided virtually by a set of machines, in the case of a
clustering or load balancing situation -- which box is then w.e.o., if
you need to ssh into it?  i don't *automatically* equate the name of the
machine with it's DNS hostname or in this case, to an evolt.org
subdomain name (though it's certainly convenient for the administrators
to have things setup this way).  it's just a name for the machine to
help humans distinguish them individually and quickly.  the name
tempest, if kept, would continue refer to this particular box, in the
same way that lists.evolt.org or dir.evolt.org or browsers.evolt.org
identify particular evolt websites.  and tempest would still be tempest
when we need to refer to it among ourselves, long after l.e.o, b.e.o and
d.e.o had grown up and moved onto their own dedicate load balanced
clusters :-)  i.e. they may currently live *on* tempest, but the box is
not l.e.o., the service is.  and the l.e.o service may be moved onto
another machine (perhaps dugdug) at a future date.

but like i said, i'm not tied emotionally to this particular name (or
theme), just the procedure.  i'd be just as happy with a breakfast
cereal theme and a box named cocoapuff -- through that wouldn'e be
nearly as cool :-)

-dave