Bad Names for Servers

Six or seven years ago our eldest child, then a preschooler, drew me a picture of the Internet1. I framed it and I keep it on the landing outside my bedroom – y’know, in case I get lost on the Internet and need a map:

Framed child-drawn picture showing multiple circles, connected by lines, each with a number 0 or 1 in it.
Lots of circles, all connected to one another, passing zeroes and ones around. Around this time she’d observed that I wrote my number zeroes “programmer-style” (crossed) and clearly tried to emulate this, too.

I found myself reminded of this piece of childhood art when she once again helped me with a network map, this weekend.

As I kick off my Automattic sabbatical I’m aiming to spend some of this and next month building a new server architecture for Three Rings. To share my plans, this weekend, I’d been drawing network diagrams showing my fellow volunteers what I was planning to implement. Later, our eldest swooped in and decided to “enhance” the picture with faces and names for each server:

Network diagram but with entities having faces and named Chungus, Atul, Summer, Gwen, Alice, Astrid, and Demmy.
I don’t think she intended it, but she’s made the primary application servers look the grumpiest. This might well fit with my experience of those servers, too.

I noted that she named the read-replica database server Demmy2, after our dog.

French Bulldog with her tongue sticking out.
You might have come across our dog before, if you followed me through Bleptember.

It’s a cute name for a server, but I don’t think I’m going to follow it. The last thing I want is for her to overhear me complaining about some possible future server problem and misinterpret what I’m saying. “Demmy is a bit slow; can you give her a kick,” could easily cause distress, not to mention “Demmy’s dying; can we spin up a replacement?”

I’ll stick to more-conventional server names for this new cluster, I think.

Footnotes

1 She spelled it “the Itnet”, but still: max props to her for thinking “what would he like a picture of… oh; he likes the Internet! I’ll draw him that!”

2 She also drew ears and a snout on the Demmy-server, in case the identity wasn’t clear to me!

× × ×