Server naming.

[camwyn]

We've taken possession of two new servers here at my office, one of which will replace our old file server. The other is going to be our Exchange server as we migrate away from web-based email. I mentioned to my fellow tech that at my old office I used to name machines after Canadian cities and provinces, or sometimes after American or Canadian founding fathers. He suggested we have a contest to come up with a naming theme for the two new servers, preferably one that could be extended to cover the other three servers eventually. I sent out an email to everyone asking for nominations, and we eventually narrowed it down to three sets- old school Star Trek (the two names suggested were Kirk and Spock), Austin Powers (Dr. Evil and Mini-Me), and Star Wars locations (Death Star and Tattooine).

Since we plan to go with the Star Trek names, the file server is going to be named Spock and the Exchange one gets to be Kirk, on the grounds that Spock provides information whereas Kirk talks with anyone and anything in sight (and no one suggested Uhura). Spock is also going to be our domain controller. The domain for which Spock is going to be controller will be Federation, as there are problems with the current internal domain name. If we extend the naming convention to the other servers we'll be using Bones and Scotty for sure; the fifth server may keep its old name for a while because of a programming project that can't be altered just yet.

All of this means:

One of the servers will not be able to give us false information. Ever.
It will, however, be vulnerable to having its CPU stolen during a brief blackout induced by a weird-looking blonde.
For the most part it will be steady as a rock and often quite annoying, but wholly functional. In fact, it will behave very reasonably for just about seven years. Then all hell will break loose unless it gets networked to another system immediately.
It will deposit a significant chunk of its own code on another system sufficient to resurrect its main functions if it looks like it's going to crash and burn. (Actually, since we use a real-time data vaulting service…)

The other server will have a mysterious ability to attract semi-attractive to gorgeous female technicians.
It will periodically spit out email messages in weird fits and starts, but all of it will get through.
Unless there are space aliens involved, it will never get a virus, even when it really deserves one.
It will repeatedly do things that really ought to result in its total destruction, but which will only take out some random terminal that was unfortunate to be hooked up to it at the time.

I have taken the step of ordering a T-shirt from ThinkGeek to change into when I'm working late. It says 'Dammit Jim, I'm a sysadmin, not a babysitter'. It seemed appropriate, considering.

Comments

[penguinzero.livejournal.com]

You'll doubtless be able to tell which terminal is the next to go when you notice it's got red wallpaper up. Or when the Kirk server sets it on some random task alone while it, the Spock server, and the sysadmins are doing something important.