10 comments

  • pelagicAustral 9 minutes ago
    I started on a new team once and I was integrating some CloudFlare services, I hooked a domain name and I was assigned a nameserver with my lastname and one with my new manager's lastname... nobody ever believed I did not picked those, people still joke about a love story that involves a manager, myself and CloudFlare.
  • majke 1 hour ago
    If you want to know more about the cache invalidation in the whole pipeline of DNS requests, take a look at this

    https://blog.cloudflare.com/tld-glue-sticks-around-too-long/

    I hinted there how the NS chain of lookups works from . to your domain. The point is that we wanted to be able to move name servers around the ip addresss, but that wouldn't work for many domains. So - in some contexts moving IP's rapidly is possible, in some it's not. Fun.

  • bantunes 1 hour ago
    "Naming strategies for servers" seems like a big enough niche for there to exist a compendium somewhere already, but I couldn't find a good one.
    • hcaz 1 hour ago
      • jimnotgym 15 minutes ago
        For LAN servers, I used to name my Linux machines after penguins. It seemed apt, made me smile, especially when new people came on board.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_penguins

        The Windows and Solaris boxes had numbers before i got there. A new guy started moving them to a name that included the os version like 'server-2008' in it. Never really liked that

      • vermilingua 46 minutes ago
        Fantastic, I have long used Culture Ship names [0] to name my devices but this is a far easier list to reference than others online

        [0] https://namingschemes.com/Culture_Ships

      • voidUpdate 1 hour ago
        Could do with having Minecraft Blocks instead of just Minecraft Materials, that's what I use for my home network
  • thelastgallon 1 hour ago
    There are 2 hard problems in computer science: naming things and cache invalidation. Cloudflare writes about how it deals with the first one.
    • aa-jv 1 hour ago
      3 hard things: you missed counting things.
      • Stratoscope 52 minutes ago
        The classic version...

        There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.

  • HariPavan 30 minutes ago
    I love these kinds of stories.
  • cynicalsecurity 27 minutes ago
    Vatican server names sounded somewhat interesting too: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. They set up their own ISP and cloud hosting since then, but it was a funny gig they did in the past.
  • hcaz 1 hour ago
  • LoganDark 8 minutes ago
    > One side note on this point: we once had someone write in to support criticizing us based on the fact that our name server convention is hetro-normative. I will simply say that just because you get two name servers doesn't mean they're in any kind of relationship.

    I mean, you could add 50 gender-neutral names to try to balance it out...

    There are infinite genders though, so it's not really fair to go beyond that.

  • Traubenfuchs 1 hour ago
    Just make it a uuid or some other kind of random a-z0-9 string to avoid all this whimsy and nuisance?
    • GuB-42 59 minutes ago
      These names are for humans to remember and to type-in, not just for computers. And whimsy names are more memorable, which is a good thing. Random strings are for computers, not humans.
    • voidUpdate 1 hour ago
      What's wrong with whimsy?
      • Traubenfuchs 1 hour ago
        It leads to friction and required follow up extra work, as explained in the article.
        • voidUpdate 1 hour ago
          Where does it say it leads to friction? Other than the little ninja drawings, but they asked for that
  • fnoef 1 hour ago
    This is so cringe. I feel like software engineers are just overgrown toddlers stuck in kindergarten: "We named our servers with boy and girls names and hired an artist to draw their personalities as ninjas!!@!111". I mean, whats wrong with a plain old 4 character hash or whatever?
    • whstl 1 hour ago
      As someone slightly older than average here, one of the perks of maturity for me is not caring much about what others think anymore. Childish or cringe are fine.

      But I don’t judge you: being a teenager or a young adult and rejecting such things is a rite of passage that we all go through.

      • CodesInChaos 1 hour ago
        > When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

        ― C.S. Lewis

        • fnoef 1 hour ago
          > When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

          ― 1 Corinthians 13:11

          • whstl 19 minutes ago
            > I also went to the stock market today. I did a business.

            Vincent Adultman

    • xnickb 1 hour ago
      What's wrong with this? They have resources and desire to make their work fun. What happened to wanting to enjoy what you're doing?
      • fnoef 1 hour ago
        The wrong in this, is the extent they went to with this. I mean, name your servers whatever you want, but hiring an artist to draw the servers personalities and then writing a blog post about this? Like common, that's something a child would do about their favorite toy. At some point, people need to grow up.

        And I guess the other "wrong with it" is the fact that it just wastes human potential. Build robust software and take pride in this, not it naming your servers bob and lola.

        • xnickb 4 minutes ago
          I disagree with your definition of what 'growing up' is about. There is something lost in the world where making silly but fun things is frowned upon. And yes, fun is subjective.

          I don't share my kids excitement about most things, but I'm genuinely happy they enjoy themselves so much. Being able to use the same notion to all people, not just (your) kids is part of growing up in my books.

        • chuckadams 1 hour ago
          I reject your joyless reality and substitute my own.
      • onesandofgrain 1 hour ago
        Maybe they should spend more time keeping their servers from crashing lol, and less on nameserver-namings
        • xnickb 11 minutes ago
          If people cared much more about how they spend their own time (and money) and less about how others spend their's world would've been a much better place. But it ain't
        • stavros 9 minutes ago
          Maybe you should spend more time doing your job better and less on HN comments.
        • voidUpdate 1 hour ago
          This is an article from 2013
          • onesandofgrain 58 minutes ago
            Exactly, they weren't proactive. Wasting their time on useless fanfiction.
            • hobofan 33 minutes ago
              Yeah, I'm sure they've spent a significant time of their whole engineering department in the 13 years since the blog post on this!
    • Galorious 1 hour ago
      Common names are much easier for people to copy over and check. As opposed to a random jumble of numbers and letters.
    • tonyhart7 38 minutes ago
      this is why you never get invited on houses party