Re-organizing the #Homelab and currently stuck on #HardThingNo2, naming things. My #aspie brain thinks it'd make most practical sense to name things by function, e.g. workstation01, firewall01, cluster01node01, etc. (which adds the question of how many leading zeroes), would like to name things with geeky references e.g. FUCKUP, Ozma, 7of9, etc. (which runs into issues as soon as you try for a coherent theme of enough components...), and is worried that from a security perspective something memorable yet unrelated to its function might be wise, e.g. blue charybdis, amber cyclops, periwinkle gorgon (But then I'm not running a spy agency here... as far as you know :-P).
@lpwaterhouse I had a short phase where I used thrash metal bands for my machines. 😅
No particular reason for why I stopped, but my two remaining machines are now called monster and beast, with beast being my beefy desktop pc. 😁
@mforester For the longest time I used Star Trek characters, tpau is still chugging along just fine. And I used to work at a FAANG-level corp where the primary and secondary email server were called data (so far so good) and lore, so I guess I wasn't in the wrong crowd there :-P But that also taught me the value of systematic names; When you spin up dozens of machines elastically then naming them isn't only pointless, it actively hinders swift error localization, because your brain goes through that additional level of indirection. function-location-somewhatuniqueid is really helpful. But then so it is for an intruder, a host named auth-something or db-something is sure the get attention fast during a breach, which is why some security departments actively mandate something like IP-, MAC-, or GUID-only, which in turn is nightmare to debug yet again... None of which applies much to a homelab, except insofar as I want to play with "realistic" toys. sigh My brain us just stuck in the evaluation loop; It's a familiar feeling, though :-P If someone has a link to a reasonable "current best practice" document I'll take it, otherwise I'll just go with boring+functional again ;-)
@lpwaterhouse I used to use 'fun' names way back in the day...but over the last 5 years I've rebuilt my entire #homelab / family production network to be named by function. At my old age, I've been thinking about when I'm gone and someone has to cleanup/manage this environment for my wife (aka my sons)...having server/container names around function will make it easier to document and determine which is essential and which can be turned off.
@agh3 Very true. Though I suspect no amount of documentation and ease-of-understanding will eventually suffice to trump the convenience of simply outsourcing everything to global-corp-inc. I'm just really torn between embracing my inner child, engineer, or paranoid here :-P
@lpwaterhouse my preferred way to do this is to name homelab hardware either with a geeky reference or something that is unique to the hardware.
I.e. my primary servers are Crushinator and Nibbler but my Wyse 3040s are all "wyse-3040-abcd" where "abcd" is the last 4 digits of their MAC address.
VMs/LXCs running on those machines are named according to function. So there's a docker01 vm running on Nibbler but I could easily migrate it to Crushinator.
@zrail Yeah, I'm currently leaning towards something similar, but I can't shake the niggling feeling that I need a perfectly coherent system. Not sure yet which part of my brain will ultimately win (But if past performance is the best predictor for future performance, then I'd bet on ending up with something entirely bland and rational. /me eyes current printer0)
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