Internet history (was: We need a better Internet)

Mark Komarinski mkomarinski at wayga.org
Thu Apr 8 09:53:12 EDT 2010


On 04/07/2010 11:42 PM, David Hardy wrote:
> Yes, md, I remember, as do many or all of us, the same bunch of names 
> for the systems, usually either from the Snow White gang, or Lord of 
> the Rings, or Hitchhiker's Guide.  Them were the daze.  Now our 
> brilliant successors name them with strings of alphanumeric characters 
> the provenance of which only they, the holy annointed ones, can fathom. 
Those were good when the number of systems was relatively small.

We had the good fortune of having musicians in our group when we built 
our HPC cluster.  We wound up naming it 'Orchestra' and everything is 
named after an instrument, giving us pretty much unlimited expansion.  
Each node type or function gets a class of instruments - databases are 
percussion, compute nodes are woodwinds or string, etc.  I have a bit of 
trouble remembering which Oracle system bass-drum is, but we maintain a 
wiki page that maintains the list in case we need to look it up.

Every system that has external connections has a service name that's not 
the same as the system name (tomcat, www, jboss, mysql, etc.) so that we 
don't have users pointing directly to something like 'marimba' and then 
have to re-educate them when we retire that system in favor of a new 
one.  They just still use mysql.

-Mark


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