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What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)
- bantunes 2mo 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 2mo agoI always refer to https://namingschemes.com/Main_Page https://namingschemes.com/Main_Page
- voidUpdate 2mo agoCould do with having Minecraft Blocks instead of just Minecraft Materials, that's what I use for my home network
- vermilingua 2mo agoFantastic, 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 https://namingschemes.com/Culture_Ships
- jimnotgym 2mo agoFor 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 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
- gear54rus 2mo agohttps://namingschemes.com/Physical_Injuries https://namingschemes.com/Physical_Injuries lol
- jaggederest 2mo agoGood to see I'm probably not the only one who worked with a monstrous single database for all the things named "Yggdrasil", and a job server that was seemingly constantly trying to take it down named "Nidhogg".
- TimByte 2mo agoThe interesting taxonomy may be less about the source of the names and more about what properties they have
- hcaz 2mo agoAs always https://xkcd.com/910/ https://xkcd.com/910/
- Traubenfuchs 2mo agoJust make it a uuid or some other kind of random a-z0-9 string to avoid all this whimsy and nuisance?
- voidUpdate 2mo agoWhat's wrong with whimsy?
- Traubenfuchs 2mo agoIt leads to friction and required follow up extra work, as explained in the article.
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- voidUpdate 2mo agoWhere does it say it leads to friction? Other than the little ninja drawings, but they asked for that
- GuB-42 2mo agoThese 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.
- gbalduzzi 2mo agoYeah, very comfortable to use in a conversation. > Yeah if I'm not mistaken the ticketing service is deployed on t56kl-293d1-5gqp7, do you think we should move it to iwi49-oaqq0-492fa?
- fnoef 2mo agoThis 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?
- xnickb 2mo agoWhat's wrong with this? They have resources and desire to make their work fun. What happened to wanting to enjoy what you're doing?
- onesandofgrain 2mo agoMaybe they should spend more time keeping their servers from crashing lol, and less on nameserver-namings
- voidUpdate 2mo agoThis is an article from 2013
- onesandofgrain 2mo agoExactly, they weren't proactive. Wasting their time on useless fanfiction.
- hobofan 2mo agoYeah, I'm sure they've spent a significant time of their whole engineering department in the 13 years since the blog post on this!
- onesandofgrain 2mo agoThe only useful thing they provide is DDOS protection and free analytics. For some reason the whole world is brainwashed into thinking we need all of these horrendous cloud providers. Hetzner is thankfully taking up the market. You need a server and that's it + some ddos protection.
- thelastgallon 2mo agoThere are 2 hard problems in computer science: naming things and cache invalidation. Cloudflare writes about how it deals with the first one.
- aa-jv 2mo ago3 hard things: you missed counting things.
- Stratoscope 2mo agoThe classic version... There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.
- stavros 2mo agoThe joke only works if it's still two things.
- majke 2mo agoIf 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/ 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.
- HariPavan 2mo agoI love these kinds of stories.
- cynicalsecurity 2mo agoVatican 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.
- pelagicAustral 2mo agoI 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.
- LoganDark 2mo 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.
- TimByte 2mo agoA surprising amount of infrastructure design seems to be hiding patterns that humans will otherwise turn into unsupported features