In this video from ITFreeTraining I will look at naming conventions. In small networks,
you can get by without a naming convention. However, on large networks, or if your network
expands, it is important to have a good naming convention in place as it is difficult to
change later on.
In the old days of computing, we are talking about the 90’s which is a long time ago
in computing, I used a UNIX server called Wumpus. What is a Wumpus? It a rare strong
creature that likes to eat people and hang from ceilings. Does the name Wumpus tell us
anything about what the server does or where the server is? The answer is no.
In small networks you could name all your computers after Simpson characters or movie
characters if you wish, but this does not give any indication what the computer does
and is not looked on as professional in the IT industry. Many companies in the early days
have regretted later on using a naming convention like these and nowadays would not even consider it.
In this video I will look at ways to name your printers, computers, servers, e-mail
addresses and file shares, but first I will look at what makes a good naming convention.
There are many different naming conventions in use today and if you have the chance to
work in different companies it is more than likely each company is using a different naming
convention. The choice of naming convention comes down to what an individual administrator
feels is important and what they are trying to achieve.
A useful naming convention provides useful information like location, owner and usage
type. When you start to consider a naming convention, start to think about your current
and future needs. If all your computers are in the 1 country and this is unlikely to change,
it is probably not necessary to include the country in the naming convention. The administrator
needs to consider factors like these to get the best out of the naming convention they choose.
When possible, the naming convention should be inventory friendly. If your naming convention
works with your audit software, it will make your job a lot easier. Lastly your naming
convention should have a low chance of collisions. This occurs mainly with e-mail addresses.
If for example you were to use only the first name of the person in an e-mail address, then
there is a high chance that in the long term the company will hire a second person with
the same first name. When collisions like these occur the second user name needs to
be something different. Usually adding a number to the end fixes this but you will want to
avoid this whenever possible.
First I will look at printers. One of the big mistakes I have seen in my career in my
opinion is to include model names in the printer name. Consider that your company buys a basic
printer. It is made by the company “Dart” so it is given the name Dart01. The problem
occurs when the printer is replaced. There is a good chance the printer will be replaced
by a printer manufactured by a different company. The new printer is made by Whiz Printers.
The problem occurs when, in order to get the printer going as quick as possible, the old
printer name of Dart01 is used.
Changing the printer name would mean reinstalling the printer on every user’s computer that
was using that printer. If the printer was to fail suddenly and had to be replaced, the
quickest way for the administrator to get the printer working again would be to use
the old name. I have seen scenarios like these in the work place where a printer is replaced
and the old printer name is used for years later.
The administrator could also name the printer after characteristics of the printer. For
example, if the printer was color or not. In this example, the printer has been replaced
by a printer that does double sided printing, collating, stapling and A3 printing. If
the printer name Color01 was still used, this does not describe any of the new features
that printer has.
I will now look at two different naming standards for printers. There are endless amount of
ways an administrator could choose to name their printers and it is a matter of
choosing the best one for your company.
In this example, we have a printer in the United States, in the state New York, on level
1 of a large office building in the art department. The printer is also the 3rd printer to be
installed in the art department.
In this example, the printer could be called USANYLVL1ART03. You can see this printer name
is quite long, however quite descriptive. From the name alone, you get a good idea of
where this printer is located in the world. This naming standard is good for very large
organizations. This would be a good system to use for companies like Microsoft who have
over 100,000 employees and offices all over the world.
The second standard I will look at is a simple version of the first. More suited for smaller
organizations. This could be used when you have a small number of printers but they are
spread out over a large area.
In this example you will find the closest airport and use the international airport code for
that airport and then combine it with the number of the printer. In this case it would
give you SYD03. You could also use country codes depending on your needs. This may seem
very simple, but if you consider that most organizations now are using a small number
of photo copiers rather than a large number of printers, you may find that your company
has a surprising few number of printers compared to 10 or 20 years ago. It is matter of the
administrator looking at their needs and considering what their future needs will be.
The next point to consider is how you are going to name the computers on your network.
One example is to start with the division. Companies are divided up into different areas
but generally come under one large division which will generally be where the money comes
from for the computers.
Next consider the location of the computer. In this case the closest airport was used,
but you may want to use country or state. Next, the type of computer was used, in this
case “desktop”. I have not included it in here, but you could also include operating
system. Lastly I have used the asset tag. Some companies will put an asset tag on their
computers to help identify them. You could also use the serial number, but it is best
to keep the computer name to 15 characters or less for compatibility reasons.
Once all these items are combined they give, ITSYDD00001. You can see this computer name
is quite descriptive. If an administrator was to see this computer name in a log file,
this would give them a lot of information about the computer that generated the event
in the log file.
The next naming standard that I will look at is Server Names. Generally a server is
named after the location and its task. In this example, the server would be called NYFS01
since it is located in New York and is a file server. If more file servers were added to
the network they could be simply have the number on the end incremented.
In most cases there are a lot less servers than desktops and laptops. So there is generally
no need to include the asset tag in the server name. Even if you have a large server room
with 100’s of servers, the servers are all in one location and easy to audit if required
so there is no need to have the asset tag in the server name. However, it is up to the
administrator to how they want to do this.
Including details like the OS in the server name is generally not done. This is because
the OS on the server may be upgraded or the server could be replaced. It is not uncommon
for end users to be connecting to a particular server and over the years the server OS is
upgraded and the hardware replaced but the name of the server stays the same.
The next standard I will look at is for e-mail addresses. Like before there are many different
standards in use. The point to remember is that collisions decrease as length and complexity
increase. To understand what a collision is, consider this example. On this network there
are 4 users.
To start with, I will look at using a naming standard that just uses their first name.
In this case you can see that there are two users with the first name of John. This is
called a collision. When two or more user names result in the same e-mail address. When
this occurs most companies will add a number to the end of one of the e-mail addresses
to make them unique. You, of course, want to create a naming system that reduces the
number of collisions.
To test how good this naming standard is, I used a random name generator to generate
1000 names. I then ran a number of naming standards on that list. 17% of the people
in the list had the same name as another person in the organization. You can see that even
though this standard creates very short e-mail addresses, in a reasonably sized organization
you will start having a lot of collisions.
The next standard that I will look at is first initial followed by last name. When I ran
this standard with the 1000 random generated names I got 2% collisions.
The next standard I ran was first name followed by last initial. This resulted in 4% collisions.
This tends to suggest that last names are more unique then first names.
The last standard that I ran was first name followed by last name separated by a period.
This is a common standard I see used in a lot of organizations. This resulted in zero
collisions. With a larger group of names it is likely to get some collisions, but this
will be rare. I have also seen companies use middle initials in the e-mail address as well.
Even though this does reduce the number of possible collision even more, I personally
think it is not necessary unless the organization is very large, for example over 10000 employees.
There is also the problem you will encounter where a staff member does not have a middle
name. This does make things more complicated, especially when attempting to do data linking
between different systems. I have seen one company administrator use an X for staff without
a middle name where another administrator left the initial out completely. This made
writing code to link different systems together quite interesting. To avoid the headache I
would not use the middle name and not use X for staff without a middle name, but that
is just my opinion.
To finish, I will look at how to name file shares in your organization. In the old days
of Windows, if you wanted to hide a share so it could not be browsed you would end the
share with a dollar sign. This tended to be used when you had 100’s of user shares on
one server. Users only require access to their own share and do not need to look at the other
shares.
Nowadays hiding a share can be achieved in a number of different ways. For example using
access based enumeration will hide folders the user does not have access to creating
the same effect. An Administrator could also just configure the share to be hidden. Something
that in the older versions of Windows was not possible.
If you are creating home shares, then the same kind of naming standard can be used that
was used for e-mail addresses. In a lot of cases, the chance of collisions is lower since
staff are spread out between different servers. For example, a company with thousands of staff
around the world would be unlikely to have two staff with the same name working at the
same office connecting to the same file server. So the administrator may go for a simpler
naming standard than that used for e-mail addresses.
With other shares, there are no real rules, but generally something short and descriptive
works well. For example, a public accessible share could just be called public. For a department
share you could start with Dep following by a short name for the department. The choice
is really up to the administrator to decide what works for them.
If you are planning to implement your own naming system in the real world, how would
you go about it? First consider your current and future needs. If it looks like the company
will expand overseas it may be worth putting a country code in the naming convention. If
all your computers are in the same country and this does not look like it is going to
change, there is no point putting a country code in the computer name.
Consider how often the names will change. Do computers move around a lot or get upgraded.
If computers are moved around it may not be worth putting the department name in a computer
name. The same goes for the operating system if the computer is likely to be upgraded.
If changes like these occur and you have the location or the OS in the computer name, the
computer name will no longer describe the computer. This makes supporting these computers
more confusing for the support people unless the computer names are changed as well which
is more work for the administrators and support staff.
Next you should consider what information is collected by management software. The software
that you manage the computers on may collect a lot of the information that you were planning
to put into the computer name. If it is doing a good job of managing this, there may not
be any point adding that info to the name.
You should consider if you can use group policy and active directory to achieve the same results.
Printers that are near the user can automatically be installed using group policy. It is just
a matter of dividing them up into different containers in Active Directory and applying
group policy. In Active Directory, additional fields about where the printer is and what
features the printer has can be recorded. If this is the case, a simple printer name
can be used.
Computer names should be kept to 15 characters or less. DNS supports larger computer names,
however these may cause compatibility problems with systems like Windows file sharing. Do
no use special characters in the names. Even if they are allowed in a device name, these
may cause problems later on with inventory software.
Start computer names and printer names with a letter. If you start them with a number,
even if this is allowed, this can cause problems with auditing software. Names that are all
digits will be interpreted as numbers by certain software. This can causes problems linking
the data up between different programs.
If you are planning on using asset tags with bar codes, for the same reasons as stated
before, make sure you start the barcode with a letter, otherwise when you scan the barcode,
some software may interpret this as a number. This will cause linking problems when you
have one software interpreting it as alphanumeric and another software interpreting it as numeric.
Thanks for watching this video from ITFreeTraining. I hope you have found it useful. I hope to
see you in other videos in this course and others. Until then, thanks for watching.