MERIT

Since the dawn of networking, engineers and administrators have worked to develop The Best Naming Convention for the devices on their network. They have tried everything from locale-based to function-based, numbering devices at a single location or across a network to a mix of all of the above. Some have named devices after bands or constellations or beers, others have tried some arcane mixture of letters and numbers that you need to consult the Oracle to translate. Tufts University gave a presentation at NANOG in 2004 [1] about this exact challenge and there are hundreds of forum posts and articles on-line discussing which approaches are best and worst.

Googling anything related to naming conventions will give you a host of responses (as we’re focused on network here, we’re not even going to get into about server/IT naming). Some of what’s out there appears to be helpful, others, not so much (including one engineer who wanted to name devices completely numerically with each number corresponding to some nomenclature in a database).

As with anything there is a lot of personal preference involved. Some engineers want to know at a glance where a device is physically located, while others prefer to know what type of device it is and others want to know the organization associated with the device. Some engineers would like all of that information in the name of the device, while others believe if you have a database people can look that information up.

Obviously, your chances of having a team of engineers agree on the same naming convention is pretty unlikely. However, if you come up with a convention which you can justify – as well as provide examples of how it will improve the existing system – you will easily get buy-in from the team.

Finally, the whole conversation depends, of course, on the type of network in question. An engineer on a college campus has different needs than an engineer for a global Fortune 500 company. Most agree that any convention needs to be easy to understand (for the engineers working with it), scalable, documented and unique (in that each device has its own name).

At Merit we’ve started to take another look at our naming convention to see if there’s room for improvement (and let’s be honest, there’s always room for improvement). On the plus side, the majority of our devices are located within the state of Michigan so, in general, we don’t need any indicators for country or state. On the minus side, do you know how many cities in Michigan start with ‘Lake…’ For awhile we tried using CLLI (Common Language Location Identifier) codes, a common telephone company designator, until we discovered many towns in the state were never assigned one!

As with anything, everyone has a different opinion on what works and what doesn’t, and in the end, it doesn’t really matter what people in the industry or even your peers are doing. What matters is that your engineers are on board, that they understand the need for it, it can grow to accommodate your network and it’s documented for new hires. There is no real wrong answer here, well, outside of using Wing Dings.