The Naming of Hosts

The Naming of Hosts

The Naming of Hosts is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a host must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there’s the CNAME you want to use daily,
Such as nms, intranet, HR or games–
Such as payroll, or passwordchange, IT or training,
All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound better,
Vendors and products that all sound the same,
Such as PeopleSoft, OpenView, Cisco, or NetApp–
But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a host needs a name that’s unusual,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can it justify license renewals,
Or memory upgrades, or hybrid flash drives?

For names of this kind, I can give you a standard,
Twelve bytes for location, and fifteen for app,
These names are the ones that are never remembered,
They’re cryptic, unreadable, frustrating crap.

But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover–
But THE HOST ITSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a host has high utilization,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
The processor’s busy in rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of its name:
Its ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular host name.

–John Herbert, with sincere apologies to T.S.Eliot