RFC1178

Network Working Group D. Libes Request for Comments: 1178 Integrated Systems Group/NIST FYI: 5 August 1990

                  Choosing a Name for Your Computer

Status of this Memo

  This FYI RFC is a republication of a Communications of the ACM
  article on guidelines on what to do and what not to do when naming
  your computer [1].  This memo provides information for the Internet
  community.  It does not specify any standard.

  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

  In order to easily distinguish between multiple computers, we give
  them names.  Experience has taught us that it is as easy to choose
  bad names as it is to choose good ones.  This essay presents
  guidelines for deciding what makes a name good or bad.

  Keywords: domain name system, naming conventions, computer
  administration, computer network management

Introduction

  As soon as you deal with more than one computer, you need to
  distinguish between them.  For example, to tell your system
  administrator that your computer is busted, you might say, "Hey Ken.
  Goon is down!"

  Computers also have to be able to distinguish between themselves.
  Thus, when sending mail to a colleague at another computer, you might
  use the command "mail libes@goon".

  In both cases, "goon" refers to a particular computer.  How the name
  is actually dereferenced by a human or computer need not concern us
  here.  This essay is only concerned with choosing a "good" name.  (It
  is assumed that the reader has a basic understanding of the domain
  name system as described by [2].)

  By picking a "good" name for your computer, you can avoid a number of
  problems that people stumble over again and again.

  Here are some guidelines on what NOT to do.

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RFC 1178 Name Your Computer August 1990

     Don't overload other terms already in common use.

        Using a word that has strong semantic implications in the
        current context will cause confusion.  This is especially true
        in conversation where punctuation is not obvious and grammar is
        often incorrect.

        For example, a distributed database had been built on top of
        several computers.  Each one had a different name.  One machine
        was named "up", as it was the only one that accepted updates.
        Conversations would sound like this: "Is up down?"  and "Boot
        the machine up." followed by "Which machine?"

        While it didn't take long to catch on and get used to this
        zaniness, it was annoying when occasionally your mind would
        stumble, and you would have to stop and think about each word
        in a sentence.  It is as if, all of a sudden, English has
        become a foreign language.

     Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine.

        A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was
        going to be used to control a number of machines on a shop
        floor.  A while later, a new machine was acquired to help with
        some of the processing.  Needless to say, it couldn't be called
        "shop" as well.  Indeed, both machines ended up performing more
        specific tasks, allowing more precision in naming.  A year
        later, five new machines were installed and the original one
        was moved to an unrelated project.  It is simply impossible to
        choose generic names that remain appropriate for very long.

        Of course, they could have called the second one "shop2" and so
        on.  But then one is really only distinguishing machines by
        their number.  You might as well just call them "1", "2", and
        "3".  The only time this kind of naming scheme is appropriate
        is when you have a lot of machines and there are no reasons for
        any human to distinguish between them.  For example, a master
        computer might be controlling an array of one hundred
        computers.  In this case, it makes sense to refer to them with
        the array indices.

        While computers aren't quite analogous to people, their names
        are.  Nobody expects to learn much about a person by their
        name.  Just because a person is named "Don" doesn't mean he is
        the ruler of the world (despite what the "Choosing a Name for
        your Baby" books say).  In reality, names are just arbitrary
        tags.  You cannot tell what a person does for a living, what
        their hobbies are, and so on.

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RFC 1178 Name Your Computer August 1990

     Don't use your own name.

        Even if a computer is sitting on your desktop, it is a mistake
        to name it after yourself.  This is another case of
        overloading, in which statements become ambiguous.  Does "give
        the disk drive to don" refer to a person or computer?

        Even using your initials (or some other moniker) is
        unsatisfactory.  What happens if I get a different machine
        after a year?  Someone else gets stuck with "don" and I end up
        living with "jim".  The machines can be renamed, but that is
        excess work and besides, a program that used a special
        peripheral or database on "don" would start failing when it
        wasn't found on the "new don".

        It is especially tempting to name your first computer after
        yourself, but think about it.  Do you name any of your other
        possessions after yourself?  No.  Your dog has its own name, as
        do your children.  If you are one of those who feel so inclined
        to name your car and other objects, you certainly don't reuse
        your own name.  Otherwise you would have a great deal of
        trouble distinguishing between them in speech.

        For the same reason, it follows that naming your computer the
        same thing as your car or another possession is a mistake.

     Don't use long names.

        This is hard to quantify, but experience has shown that names
        longer than eight characters simply annoy people.

        Most systems will allow prespecified abbreviations, but why not
        choose a name that you don't have to abbreviate to begin with?
        This removes any chance of confusion.

     Avoid alternate spellings.

        Once we called a machine "czek".  In discussion, people
        continually thought we were talking about a machine called
        "check".  Indeed, "czek" isn't even a word (although "Czech"
        is).

        Purposely incorrect (but cute) spellings also tend to annoy a
        large subset of people.  Also, people who have learned English
        as a second language often question their own knowledge upon
        seeing a word that they know but spelled differently.  ("I
        guess I've always been spelling "funxion" incorrectly.  How
        embarrassing!")

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RFC 1178 Name Your Computer August 1990

        By now you may be saying to yourself, "This is all very
        silly...people who have to know how to spell a name will learn
        it and that's that." While it is true that some people will
        learn the spelling, it will eventually cause problems
        somewhere.

        For example, one day a machine named "pythagoris" (sic) went
        awry and began sending a tremendous number of messages to the
        site administrator's computer.  The administrator, who wasn't a
        very good speller to begin with, had never seen this machine
        before (someone else had set it up and named it), but he had to
        deal with it since it was clogging up the network as well as
        bogging down his own machine which was logging all the errors.
        Needless to say, he had to look it up every time he needed to
        spell "pythagoris".  (He suspected there was an abbreviation,
        but he would have had to log into yet another computer (the
        local nameserver) to find out and the network was too jammed to
        waste time doing that.)

     Avoid domain names.

        For technical reasons, domain names should be avoided.  In
        particular, name resolution of non-absolute hostnames is
        problematic.  Resolvers will check names against domains before
        checking them against hostnames.  But we have seen instances of
        mailers that refuse to treat single token names as domains.
        For example, assume that you mail to "libes@rutgers" from
        yale.edu.  Depending upon the implementation, the mail may go
        to rutgers.edu or rutgers.yale.edu (assuming both exist).

     Avoid domain-like names.

        Domain names are either organizational (e.g., cia.gov) or
        geographical (e.g., dallas.tx.us).  Using anything like these
        tends to imply some connection.  For example, the name "tahiti"
        sounds like it means you are located there.  This is confusing
        if it is really somewhere else (e.g., "tahiti.cia.gov is
        located in Langley, Virginia?  I thought it was the CIA's
        Tahiti office!").  If it really is located there, the name
        implies that it is the only computer there.  If this isn't
        wrong now, it inevitably will be.

        There are some organizational and geographical names that work
        fine.  These are exactly the ones that do not function well as
        domain names.  For example, amorphous names such as rivers,
        mythological places and other impossibilities are very
        suitable.  ("earth" is not yet a domain name.)

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RFC 1178 Name Your Computer August 1990

     Don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names.

        Words like "moron" or "twit" are good names if no one else is
        going to see them.  But if you ever give someone a demo on your
        machine, you may find that they are distracted by seeing a
        nasty word on your screen.  (Maybe their spouse called them
        that this morning.)  Why bother taking the chance that they
        will be turned off by something completely irrelevant to your
        demo.

     Don't use digits at the beginning of the name.

        Many programs accept a numerical internet address as well as a
        name.  Unfortunately, some programs do not correctly
        distinguish between the two and may be fooled, for example, by
        a string beginning with a decimal digit.

        Names consisting entirely of hexadecimal digits, such as
        "beef", are also problematic, since they can be interpreted
        entirely as hexadecimal numbers as well as alphabetic strings.

     Don't use non-alphanumeric characters in a name.

        Your own computer may handle punctuation or control characters
        in a name, but most others do not.  If you ever expect to
        connect your computer to a heterogeneous network, you can count
        on a variety of interpretations of non-alphanumeric characters
        in names.  Network conventions on this are surprisingly
        nonstandard.

     Don't expect case to be preserved.

        Upper and lowercase characters look the same to a great deal of
        internet software, often under the assumption that it is doing
        you a favor.  It may seem appropriate to capitalize a name the
        same way you might do it in English, but convention dictates
        that computer names appear all lowercase.  (And it saves
        holding down the shift key.)

  Now that we've heard what not to do, here are some suggestions on
  names that work well.

     Use words/names that are rarely used.

        While a word like "typical" or "up" (see above) isn't computer
        jargon, it is just too likely to arise in discussion and throw
        off one's concentration while determining the correct referent.
        Instead, use words like "lurch" or "squire" which are unlikely

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RFC 1178 Name Your Computer August 1990

        to cause any confusion.

        You might feel it is safe to use the name "jose" just because
        no one is named that in your group, but you will have a problem
        if you should happen to hire Jose.  A name like "sphinx" will
        be less likely to conflict with new hires.

     Use theme names.

        Naming groups of machines in a common way is very popular, and
        enhances communality while displaying depth of knowledge as
        well as imagination.  A simple example is to use colors, such
        as "red" and "blue".  Personality can be injected by choices
        such as "aqua" and "crimson".

        Certain sets are finite, such as the seven dwarfs.  When you
        order your first seven computers, keep in mind that you will
        probably get more next year.  Colors will never run out.

        Some more suggestions are: mythical places (e.g., Midgard,
        Styx, Paradise), mythical people (e.g., Procne, Tereus, Zeus),
        killers (e.g., Cain, Burr, Boleyn), babies (e.g., colt, puppy,
        tadpole, elver), collectives (e.g., passel, plague, bevy,
        covey), elements (e.g., helium, argon, zinc), flowers (e.g.,
        tulip, peony, lilac, arbutus).  Get the idea?

     Use real words.

        Random strings are inappropriate for the same reason that they
        are so useful for passwords.  They are hard to remember.  Use
        real words.

     Don't worry about reusing someone else's hostname.

        Extremely well-known hostnames such as "sri-nic" and "uunet"
        should be avoided since they are understood in conversation as
        absolute addresses even without a domain.  In all other cases,
        the local domain is assumed to qualify single-part hostnames.
        This is similar to the way phone numbers are qualified by an
        area code when dialed from another area.

        In other words, if you have choosen a reasonable name, you do
        not have to worry that it has already been used in another
        domain.  The number of hosts in a bottom-level domain is small,
        so it shouldn't be hard to pick a name unique only to that
        domain.

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RFC 1178 Name Your Computer August 1990

     There is always room for an exception.

        I don't think any explanation is needed here.  However, let me
        add that if you later decide to change a name (to something
        sensible like you should have chosen in the first place), you
        are going to be amazed at the amount of pain awaiting you.  No
        matter how easy the manuals suggest it is to change a name, you
        will find that lots of obscure software has rapidly accumulated
        which refers to that computer using that now-ugly name.  It all
        has to be found and changed.  People mailing to you from other
        sites have to be told.  And you will have to remember that
        names on old backup media labels correspond to different names.

        I could go on but it would be easier just to forget this
        guideline exists.

Conclusion

  Most people don't have the opportunity to name more than one or two
  computers, while site administrators name large numbers of them.  By
  choosing a name wisely, both user and administrator will have an
  easier time of remembering, discussing and typing the names of their
  computers.

  I have tried to formalize useful guidelines for naming computers,
  along with plenty of examples to make my points obvious.  Having been
  both a user and site administrator, many of these anecdotes come from
  real experiences which I have no desire to relive.  Hopefully, you
  will avoid all of the pitfalls I have discussed by choosing your
  computer's name wisely.

Credits

  Thanks to the following people for suggesting some of these
  guidelines and participating in numerous discussions on computer
  naming: Ed Barkmeyer, Peter Brown, Chuck Hedrick, Ken Manheimer, and
  Scott Paisley.

  This essay first appeared in the Communications of the ACM, November,
  1989, along with a Gary Larson cartoon reprinted with permission of
  United Press Syndicate.  The text is not subject to copyright, since
  it is work of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
  However, the author, CACM, and NIST request that this credit appear
  with the article whenever it is reprinted.

Libes

RFC 1178 Name Your Computer August 1990

References

  [1]  Libes, D., "Choosing a Name for Your Computer", Communications
  of the ACM, Vol. 32, No. 11, Pg. 1289, November 1989.

  [2]  Mockapetris, P., "Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities",
  RFC 1034, USC/Information Sciences Institute, November 1987.

Security Considerations

  Security issues are not discussed in this memo.

Author's Address

  Don Libes
  Integrated Systems Group
  National Institute of Standards and Technology
  Gaithersburg, MD 20899

  Phone: (301) 975-3535

  EMail:  [email protected]

Libes