Stricklin, Raymond J wrote:
On the contrary. It is the users wanting hostnames > 8
characters who are grateful that the hostname and VM
username need not match.
The RFC which Grega mentioned says otherwise.
But at this point, we're arguing matters of taste.
The RFC was drafted in 1990, at a time when only the newest UNIX systems
were capable of handling a hostname longer than 8 characters. There were
many UNIX systems still in use which were limited in this way, and
limited too, for that matter, to 13 character filenames. In fact, HP-UX
couldn't reliably handle hostnames longer than 8 characters for another
ten years after this RFC was drafted.
Don't forget that you only got 6 characters for a DECNET node name, too,
so sometimes it was advisable to limit IP hostnames even further!
This is all ancient history, though relevant if your shop is still
supporting machines old enough to be affected by these limitations. If
so, I feel your pain.
If you remember all that, you must be nearly ready for retirement too:-)
That said, host naming conventions are definitely a matter of taste. My
personal preference is to anthropomorphize heavily, and assign CNAMEs if
you want to name functions or services (i.e. a machine named 'wingnut'
which is also known as 'ns3', 'smtp-outgoing', and 'www'). There are a
lot of really outstanding reasons why I feel this way, but not everybody
agrees. And that's okay, too. Some of the reasons for disagreeing are
even reasonable ones. (@;
I just use a bunch of animal names I roll out as required, but then
these days I'm strictly small enterprise and don't have to worry much
about many toys.
I was thinking though, back to when VTAM was new and folk were naming
terminals. No more than eight characters, and they folded a location
code and serial number into each name. If someone complained about
WACAVT09 not working, probably the responsible person could go, if not
to the device itself, at least to the right room.
Our network, for what it was, was pretty much point to point over leased
lines: I don't recall that the computers even had names: probably only
one to an office (location, not room) anyway.
Later, when we had mainframes in the state capitals, there was only one
in each location except Canberra, where they were CBRA, CBRB etc (for
SMF purposes, I think) I don't recall other names, but probably we used
the same codes airlines do.
Names based on location and function have their good points.
I note that for some years (but no longer) there were half-a-dozen or so
IP addresses associated with www.ibm.com.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
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