homelab

Server and VM Naming Conventions

Curtis

Jul 20, 2019 • 1 min read

I’m always looking for ways to improve my naming scheme, and make it easier to remember the hosts and their function. For the longest time, I had decided on just short aliases for the names, but, as time grew on and the count increased, it was harder and harder to remember which server did what.

After iterations, I decided on a hybrid approach of having both a functional name and alias, for example Monty and Cleo have functional names:

Monty: can-hyp01
Cleo: can-hyp02

By providing a hybrid naming scheme, it made my DNS more complex, but easier to maintain. For example, here’s some entries:

jira01.can-hyp01.thegeekbin.com => 10.24.23.12
jira01.monty.thegeekbin.com => CNAME jira01.can-hyp01.thegeekbin.com

website.can-hyp01.thegeekbin.com => 10.44.44.2
dbms.can-hyp01.thegeekbin.com => 10.44.44.3
website.monty.thegeekbin.com => CNAME website.can-hyp01.thegeekbin.com

website.can-hyp02.thegeekbin.com => 10.46.46.2
dbms.can-hyp02.thegeekbin.com => 10.46.46.3
website.cleo.thegeekbin.com => CNAME website.can-hyp02.thegeekbin.com

thegeekbin.com => CNAME [website.cleo.thegeekbin.com, website.monty.thegeekbin.com]

The only unique thing about my setup right now is this blog is in a high-availability setup, with haproxy monitoring health and directing traffic as necessary. The DBMS system is setup as a master-slave replication, and can easily be changed to a master-master configuration. This helps for high loads on the blog, and on my cloud services (Nextcloud, Jira, Confluence, Plex, etc).

So, what are you doing for your hostname conventions?

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