8 comments

  • cynicalsecurity 1 minute ago
    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.
  • HariPavan 3 minutes ago
    I love these kinds of stories.
  • majke 42 minutes ago
    If 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/

    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.

  • thelastgallon 43 minutes ago
    There are 2 hard problems in computer science: naming things and cache invalidation. Cloudflare writes about how it deals with the first one.
    • aa-jv 38 minutes ago
      3 hard things: you missed counting things.
      • Stratoscope 26 minutes ago
        The classic version...

        There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.

  • bantunes 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
  • Traubenfuchs 1 hour ago
    Just make it a uuid or some other kind of random a-z0-9 string to avoid all this whimsy and nuisance?
    • GuB-42 33 minutes ago
      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.
    • voidUpdate 57 minutes ago
      What's wrong with whimsy?
      • Traubenfuchs 52 minutes ago
        It leads to friction and required follow up extra work, as explained in the article.
        • voidUpdate 35 minutes ago
          Where does it say it leads to friction? Other than the little ninja drawings, but they asked for that
  • fnoef 1 hour ago
    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?
    • whstl 49 minutes ago
      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: being a teenager or a young adult and rejecting such things is a rite of passage that we all go through.

      • CodesInChaos 45 minutes ago
        > When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

        ― C.S. Lewis

        • fnoef 37 minutes ago
          > 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.

          ― 1 Corinthians 13:11

    • xnickb 57 minutes ago
      What's wrong with this? They have resources and desire to make their work fun. What happened to wanting to enjoy what you're doing?
      • fnoef 45 minutes ago
        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.

        • chuckadams 42 minutes ago
          I reject your joyless reality and substitute my own.
      • onesandofgrain 51 minutes ago
        Maybe they should spend more time keeping their servers from crashing lol, and less on nameserver-namings
        • voidUpdate 34 minutes ago
          This is an article from 2013
          • onesandofgrain 32 minutes ago
            Exactly, they weren't proactive. Wasting their time on useless fanfiction.
            • hobofan 6 minutes ago
              Yeah, I'm sure they've spent a significant time of their whole engineering department in the 13 years since the blog post on this!
    • Galorious 51 minutes ago
      Common names are much easier for people to copy over and check. As opposed to a random jumble of numbers and letters.
    • tonyhart7 12 minutes ago
      this is why you never get invited on houses party