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.
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.
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.
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
Good 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".
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There are different grades of "fun". You can do silly things at work, name your servers bob and lola, while still serve the functionality and needs of your customers. But hiring an artist to draw the server as ninjas because "they protect our customers"? What kind of value does that bring? And then you write a blog post about it? Seriously?
Knowing when the fun needs to stop is a way to create valuable things in society. I prefer that, compared to living in world where the state of software is so dire because developers are overgrown kids that spend time writing blog posts about how they named their server pikachu because "pikachu is soooooo cute!!!1111"
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
Agreed, sounds like Cloudflare is adult daycare. I see it as a sign that these companies have more money to waste than they should have in a functioning competitive market.
Common names also seem retypeable, which is usually a bad idea because it is error prone, especially in certain fonts. Random jumbles make retyping untenable, so copy-paste is used, which can't make the same mistakes, but is still vulnerable to operator error with incomplete copies.