[nycbug-talk] Sanity check on new naming scheme

[Bjorn Nelson]

Steven Kreuzer wrote:
> I worked for a company that had thousands of servers in locations all over the world and early on they made the dumb decision of making the hostname a combination of the location, and either an "s" for server or "n" for network and then an incrementing number. The reasoning for this was that we could simply take a box and change its purpose and you wouldn't have to rename it. I am sure at first it worked out quite well, but when you start to get into the hundreds of boxes it became a real pain because someone would go "application x in location y doesn't seem to be working" and then I would have to spend 5 minutes figuring out where application x in location y lives.
When it gets to this level, it makes real sense to have a configuration 
management database.  Basically, something that allows you to say "what 
is hostname(s) for application x?"  We built this in font of our 
application management system.  I am kind of curious if anyone has tried 
to hook something like this up to dns directly.  Imagine after 
templating your applications (which you usually do when setting them up 
for things like nagios), you then dump all the template names with 
hostname mappings as cnames in a dns backend db (or just to straight dns 
maps and hup it).  Of course you would have to enforce dns friendly 
names for your templates but this could make the functional naming part 
of dns management an automated process.

-Bjorn