Jody, Everywhere I've worked (except my current employer, AFAICT) has had a system for naming servers internally (for reference to the machine in particular) and vhosts for the services themselves.
When I worked at Tennessee (at the time, a strict Sun shop), all the servers were named after sun worshipping peoples. The development servers were named after MST3K notables. At Emory, the servers had inconsistent themes: some were chemists, some were mythical spider creatures. If I set up development a machine, it was always named after a Godzilla character. At Tech there seems to be no rhyme or reason to our hostnames and, like Dan laments, we have some servers named with products for hostnames: "Illiad", "Eres", etc. (sigh). I don't have any control over my development server names, here, either -- no system. Rob Casson told me that all the servers at Miami of Ohio are named after Sherlock Holmes characters. Personally, I find it helpful to have an internal name and public name to abstract the service from the "hardware". I imagine that might vary from person to person, though. -Ross. On 10/26/06, Jody Fagan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dear Code4Lib folks, I'd like to write an anecdotal article about library server nomenclature ... I'm for-sure that most librarians don't even know our servers have names. I am hoping that some of you might be willing to share (off-list) server names you have known in libraries, how/why you chose them, and any random thoughts you have about them. Did you inherit them? Did you get to pick them out? Do you think the whole idea of server names is silly or do you secretly like the fact that your servers have names? I am happy to guarantee anonymity (that is, I won't use your name or institution in conjunction with any server names) unless you specifically want to be identified or given credit for your statements. I plan on sharing my institution's server names in my article, but not say where they are from.... thanks for considering this, Jody -- Jody Condit Fagan Digital Services Librarian, James Madison University 540-568-4265 [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time" -- Alan Moore http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html
