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Dear KV,

An argument recently broke out between two factions of our systems administration team concerning the naming of our next set of hosts. One faction wants to name machines after services, with each host having a numeric suffix, and the other wants to continue our current scheme of each host having a unique name, without a numeric string. We now have so many hosts that any unique name is getting quite long—and is annoying to type. A compromise was recently suggested whereby each host could have two names in our internal DNS (Domain Name System), but this seems overly complicated. How do you decide on a host-naming scheme?

Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,

I refer you to T.S. Eliot, who pointed out—sort of:

The Naming of Hosts is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games;

You may think at first I’m as mad
as a hatter
When I tell you, a host must have
THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

“The Naming of Cats” (not hosts) is a
poem in T.S. Eliot’s poetry book, Old
Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and its
stage adaptation is Andrew Lloyd Web-
ber’s popular musical, Cats. The poem
describes to humans how cats get their
names. I took some liberties with El-
iot’s wording—as others have done
before me—and extended the analogy
to describe the naming of hosts. But
given that T.S. Eliot died just about
the time the first minicomputers were
being designed, I do not think he had
host names in mind when he wrote
his poem. And that is a good thing, be-
cause if you think two names are bad,
three would only be worse!
The naming of hosts is a difficult
matter that ranks with coding style,
editor choice, and language prefer-
ence in the pantheon of things com-
puter people fight about that do not
matter to anyone else in the whole
world. What is even more annoying—
or amusing—but actually annoying, is
that if you are in the wrong bar at the
wrong time, you will hear systems ad-
ministrators fighting about naming
schemes and crying in their drinks
over the names they lovingly gave to
hosts at their previous companies.

Giving something a name has a simple purpose: to make it understandable and memorable to a community of people. Naming your variables foo, bar, and baz is amusing in a short example program, but you would not want to maintain 100 lines of code written like that. The same is true of host names. Hosts have names because people need to know how to get to them—either to use their services or to maintain them, or both. If people were not involved, hosts could simply be identified by their Internet addresses. Unfortunately, host naming is an instance where geeks like to get creative. Even more unfortunately, geeks do not always know the difference between creative and annoying. It is all very well to decide your hosts should be named after Star Trek, Star Wars, or Tolkien or Twilight characters. With Tolkien you can probably write—and someone has probably already done so—a script to generate new names based on his works, just in case The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Silmarillion did not have enough ridiculous names in them to begin with!