Would a server by any other name be as functional?

When I graduated from college, my parents bought me a new computer as a graduation gift (a Power Computing Mac clone, if you remember that odd little interlude in Apple's history). It was an order of magnitude more powerful than my Mac Plus, and I was so thrilled to have it that I decided that it would be auspicious to christen it. Since I was in grad school studying ancient history at the time, I changed the name of the hard drive from whatever the boring default was (it may have actually just been "HARD DRIVE") to "Kleopatra," using the more correct Greek spelling of the ancient queen's name.

Over the next few years -- especially after I fled academia -- I wondered if maybe I should cast aside this little bit of whimsy, but I did like thinking of my computer as more than just another grey-beige box of silicon taking up desk space. So Kleopatra stayed, and when I got a second internal hard drive, I named it after her husband Marc Antony, just to keep her company. I thought that this affectation made me unique and just a little bit weird. But then I got my first real job.

The job was as a copy editor at a San Francisco Web publishing startup, and I quickly learned that all of the Unix servers upon which our internal and external processes depended had names. And not boring names like PRODUCTION_SERVER; these machines were all named after African nations. This didn't exactly turn every trip into the office into an exotic vacation, but dealing every day with machines named Rwanda and Angola at least gave us something concrete to rant about when tech difficulties beset our work. (I hope the good people of Angola weren't hurt by the invectives we hurled when their country's namesake computer went out of commission for good, leaving us in two weeks of limbo before we eventually replaced it with Congo.) But more to the point, it taught me about the feeling of of hominess and community you get from a consistent naming system for your machines.

It's possible to give them too much personality
Photo by c.j.b.

When our business unit was merged with another one back east, and they started foisting their own, non-geographical naming conventions onto us -- well, that's when we knew that an era was ending.

The spy who named me

As it happens, such a naming system wasn't unique to our little office. Sandra Henry-Stocker was our company's Unix admin when I started that job, though she wasn't the originator of the African naming scheme. However, she did once work with a similar server naming scheme at another workplace with a slightly more exciting mission. "When I worked at the CIA," she says, "the office I worked in named its servers after states -- like Alaska and NewHampshire. We'd briefly considered wineries, but figured most of the staff would have no hope of pronouncing them, so we abandoned that idea pretty quickly."

It didn't stop there, though: "Client systems in each subnet were named after cities in the associated states. So we had systems with names like Juneau and Portsmouth. Some analysts grumbled that they wanted to 'move,' but it was easy to tell which subnet a particular analyst was on just by knowing his or her workstation's name and a bit of geography. The funny part was the looks I'd get in the elevator when I'd say to a coworker with a tone of annoyance something like 'I don't know what we're going to do about Maine! We're seeing crashes every day now.'"

It seems that this concept -- giving your servers a naming system that is at once arbitrary and consistent -- is a near-universal one, either passed down from admin to admin or reinvented dozens of times over the years. There are thousand-post Slashdot threads on the subject, and enthusiastic user discussions at O'Reilly and ISP discussion sites. What's really interesting to me is how these arbitrary conventions can take on a life of their own and affect how we think about the machines we use every day, like they did for Henry-Stocker's CIA analysts who wanted to move to better "locations."

Sometimes mere names can get downright philosophical . Lee Mandell, now the president of communications agency Matlin Mandell, recalls, "At a small agency I worked for back in the dot-com days we named our servers after quarks. Thus our file server and its mirrored backup were TRUTH and BEAUTY, because, after all 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' And our Web server and its mirrored backup were UP and DOWN. Unfortunately I never got the chance to say to my boss that, due to a server crash, UP was down -- but don't worry because DOWN is up.'"

However, naming schemes can go beyond whimsy and enter what strikes me as enabling. "At my current agency," says Mandell, "we name all our computers after playwrights. Notably our main file server was named O'Neill. It was always problematic, given to disk crashes (twice), BSOD lockups and slowness. 'But,' my partner once said to me, 'what else would you expect from a server named after an alcoholic depressive?'" Would a box merely named FILESERVER1 have been so indulged? Fortunately, since O'Neill was just a server after all and not a beloved family member or Nobel-winning playwright, it was not confronted in an elaborate intervention, but eventually merely replaced. Kaufman, the new server, "is doing just fine," Mandell reports.

Method to the madness

Is there something more to this than just whim, and an aid to anthropomorphism that may or may not be healthy? Perhaps. Sandra Henry-Stocker describes the arrangement at her current workplace. "The naming scheme, largely resulting from the fact that one of our prior sysadmins was a diver, started with Caribbean Islands -- like StCroix and StBarts -- and then moved to the Mediterranean with names like Malta and Sicily. One of the other development groups uses a naming scheme that mimics the project and system types. So we have systems named gwx1a and gwx1b where the 'gwx1' stands for 'Gateway Netra X1'. These names are so boring and easily confused (e.g., did you just say 'gwx1b' or 'gwx1d'?) that the users all refer to them by their IP addresses! The islands, on the other hand, seem to invoke some enthusiasm on the users' part. In fact, we often refer to them as 'the islands' rather than 'the servers.'"

I think there's a couple of important data points in this story. The first is that server names that seem "logical" to a particular kind of very systematic and linear computer geek -- like gwx1 -- are actually pretty difficult to remember. Our language-focused brains aren't really built to accommodate them. (It's a really bad sign when your naming scheme is less user-friendly than IP addresses!)

It's also interesting to note that enthusiasm for one scheme -- in this case, the islands -- can inhibit the adoption of another scheme viewed as inferior. Presumably the more enthusiastc you are about one, the less likely you are to brook changes. "Sometimes it seems people pay nearly as much attention to this as to how they name their kids!" says Henry-Stocker. And that reminds me of another situation I heard about second-hand. A former roommate was a research scientist, and in the department where he worked, most of the servers were named after chemical elements; however, my roommate's boss wanted to keep things a little closer to home -- so he named his group's servers after his own theories.

The march of history

And what about Kleopatra? The Egyptian queen died famously of a snakebite suicide; my Power Computing machine went less glamorously, to a tinkerer from a Mac mailing list who volunteered to take her off my hands. She was followed by a series of ancient rulers, with gaps of a few centuries between each; there was Theodosius, then Justinian, and my current laptop is named Heraclius, after the 7th-century Byzantine emperor. I even have a little ecosystem going on at home: my Wi-Fi access points, set up when I had my previous computer, are named Belisarius and Narses (after Justinian's great generals) and my iPhone is named Niketas (after Heraclius's cousin).

When my wife wanted to name her phone Pinky, rather than after some ancient figure, I didn't make too much of a fuss, even though it wounded me inside. I have something bigger to worry about: if I jump forward a few centuries with every new computer, what do I do when I catch up with the present?

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