Comment by mikepurvis
4 years ago
Ugh, we have the 15 character Active Directory limit now with hostnames, and a previous IT administration has imposed a convention that every name had to follow [prod|dev]-[ph|vm]-[service]-[nn]. So basically every production service is prod-vm-owtf-01— you get exactly four characters to actually describe what the machine does. Works great when the service is "jira" or "wiki", but there are a lot that are pretty mystical-sounding, like jkns, jwrk, cntr, hrbr, etc, where you kind of just have to know.
Do they at least allow you to set up CNAMEs?
Yes, and for many of the web-serving machines, that's what happens, they're jenkins.example.com or containers.example.com or similar. But often a singular service is backed by hidden worker nodes, databases, whatever else, and it seems silly to give those machines that level of indirection vs just using the hostname as their sole identifier.
I kind of like that honestly. No doubt you need some documentation so everyone knows what the service abbreviations are, but after you've been working there for a month you get it. Makes everything clean, consistent, and informational. You can quickly ascertain what a specific host is doing just from the name.
Oh absolutely it makes sense to have a standard, and being able to tell at a glance if something is a VM or physical machine is of value also. But dedicating 2/3s of the character budget to such a scheme is madness. If the prod-vm- prefix simply become pv-, then you'd at least be able to do pv-jenkins-01 again.
Anyway, all this was fine when we were on LDAP rather than Active Directory. So basically it's all Windows' fault.