NetSquared

I’ll be presenting at the Houston NetSquared meeting tomorrow.  The topic is Ten Thousand Villages, Fair Trade, and Social Media.  I don’t know much about the 3rd subject — that’s why I’m presenting, as I hope to learn something from the audience!

Personality

There was an old tradition in the computer world – especiallly in the Unix culture – of giving computers “colorful” named, grouped in some constellation of words, such as, oh, constellations, colors, cartoon characters, beers, and so on.This tradition has been supplanted, sadly, in much of corporate IT – coming from a PC culture. – of “embedded data” names or sequential numbers. You get computer names like HOUSQL001 – note the numeric range being reserved here, because you “might” get 998 other computers with the same location and function. Or, you get a simple US1421, a random number drawn out of a hat.This is boring. And wrong too. What happens if your computer changes location? Or function? Or takes on an additional function, like Mail? I have run in to IT managers that say “we just rename the machine”. Yikes!This is wrong, because computers have personality. Colorful .names are easier to remember and associate. I can always remember that Polaris is in our. Boston data center, and is our chief guidance center sits it runs DNS. I can never remember if US1187 is in Denver or Miami, nor what how it differs from US1178. This truly is a safety issue, if obe of them is a test machine and can be rebooted at will, while the other runs a life support system (and yes, I have logged in to the wrong customer’s machines before, about to issue a destructive command!) Continue reading Personality