Naming conventions

[Seittit]

for the love of god, please use delimiters.

Windows servers don't like hostnames exceeding 15 characters, so many admins I've worked with keep it simple and compacted

[Otanx]

for the love of god, please use delimiters.

Windows servers don't like hostnames exceeding 15 characters, so many admins I've worked with keep it simple and compacted

We ran into that when doing a revamp of our naming convention. The proposed convention was 18 characters. Lucky for us the first project to use the new names was a Windows server. Back to the drawing board to make it 14 or less.

-Otanx

[Atrum]

In my lab I use the wizards from LotR and a letter/number
ex) alatar_f1 , gandalf_c3

Production stuff I'm one that describes the product/function
ex) 4200_flr2_lb

I'm not a fan of hyphens in names, underscores avoid more issues/bugs for the products I work with.

[javentre]

I'm not keen on having model numbers in host names.   

It creates more work when we life-cycle devices because the new product has a different model number.  Not only are we updating the documentation, but the interface descriptions on every neighboring device would need to be changed.   DNS would also need to be updated.  There's also an added complexity with NMS devices when the hostname changes, it could be a simple rescan for the ifindexes, rather than a delete and add.

[Otanx]

So today I was reading the release notes for 4500 update when I ran across this line.

Before you proceed, observe the following rules for hostname:

    Do not expect case to be preserved

Uppercase and lowercase characters look the same to many internet software applications. It may seem appropriate to capitalize a name the same way you might do in English, but conventions dictate that computer names appear all lowercase. For more information, refer to RFC 1178, Choosing a Name for Your Computer.

So being the cynic that I am I read this as "We had a bug with host names, and capital letters, but instead of fixing it we are just going to point to an RFC from 1990 that says use lower case."

Appropriate RFC link.
Name Your Computer - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178

The RFC is good for a laugh. A quote "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."

edit - And for you underscore people another quote from the Cisco release notes - "Interior characters can only be letters, digits, and hyphens; periods and underscores not allowed."

-Otanx

[sgtcasey]

Any recommendations or best practices on naming your firewall objects, groups, policies, ACLs, etc?

Where I work we've started naming ACL's with as such:

<very brief description - no spaces>-<date it was created or modified>

That way you can have different 'versions' in case you need to roll it back.

[javentre]

<very brief description - no spaces>-<date it was created or modified>

That way you can have different 'versions' in case you need to roll it back.

Agreed, we take it a step further and add a letter on to the end of the date (a,b,c, etc) because it's not uncommon to do multiple revisions in the same day.

[Fred]

why the hate on underscores?

Underscores are supposed to be reserved for services.  They work, but you should avoid it.

If I had my way, I'd divide by subdomain.  I'd really like to see core01.stl.company.org for a core switch at their Seattle location.  Unfortunately, this doesn't play nicely with active directory unless you architect it the same way (which has a different set of constraints, and often isn't feasible).

At my first small ISP, we used Seinfeld character names.  Newman was a mailserver.

[chamjisky]

In a multi vendor device environment it's good to include something for the manufacturer as well
Like c for cisco j for Juniper b for brocade etc

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