Holidays

[sobrique]

Nothing says "You've been missed" when after 2 days off, you've 1500 emails, 3 'really critical things' and a 2 day backlog of work.

Including one absolutely fookin' critical restore, an urgent demand for additional disk space on a veritas cluster, and a pointy haired manager demanding I rename servers to 'conform'.

I'm considering my opinion on that latter. Ya see, the naming convention is basically just a bag of spooge. Basically, all our servers end up as S?RUGnnnn where the question mark is to signify the 'role' of the server. Unfortunately, the 'spec' was written by an arsehat who gave a load of letters, the only one of which is typically relevant is 'A' for 'Application'. So we have an awful lot of SARUGnnnnn servers, which is starting to get chronically meaningless. Increasingly of late, there's been queries of "can you check so-and-so on SARUGnnnn' which gets the response 'which one's that then?'.

(To which I typically interject 'I told you so').

Now I'm being told that "When we have the single console it will be important to be seen to conform.", which frankly is just bollocks. Yes, I fully agree that there are situations where you want similar names. When you've a cluster of 500 nearly identical servers for example. But we're rapidly reaching the point where we have 'generic server number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,' and so we have to go look it up in our database in order to have any idea of what it is/does/who's it is etc.

When one is doing systems admin, getting your servers mixed up is really not a good thing.

Comments

[jorune.livejournal.com]

I can sympathise with the server naming problem. IBM owns the desktop/server contract for LTSB and has instituted its own curious system that makes sense to them but can lead to unwieldy names.

I believe their standards come in four parts:
The type : Resource, Domain controller, etc.
A subtype? as above
A location name/company name
The local number (which could contain a subtype)

So you could have
Res/dcr/location/number
Sqm/rs/location/number
or
even
Res/rs/location/number

i.e.
APPRSLTSBDCnnnn

Private Banking still retains its model which is far easier to understand and usually describes the main function of the server.

location/function/number(if required)

i.e.
BHOffice - The office server for Birmingham
BHDev - Development Server

Simple vs 'This page left intentionally blank'. I know which one I would choose.

[malal.livejournal.com]

"APPRSLTSBDCnnnn"

ARRRGH!!! The Nightmares, The Nightmares!

Yeah, in my old job we had to deal wtih that naming convention a lot.

I just came to the conclusion that IBM UK has about 3 half compitent people in it. And they're either leaving or getting fired for not brown nosing enough...

[jorune.livejournal.com]

There are competent people working there. I know a couple of them, they were recently outsourced from C&G in Gloucester.

[malal.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course, I'd forgotten that. Yes, they've also snaffled up decent local talent from everywhere as well.

[zaitan.livejournal.com]

My manager insisted on continuing the tradition of giving the email servers names that have a reference to religion, and having them start with DE. So we have Deborah, Demeter and Devera. I almost make a point of getting them mixed up to show how annoying it is.

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Yeah, now imagine that when you have:
SARUG10332
SARUG10323
SARUG10233