[afnog] naming conventions

[Saul]

Thanks for the input.

We're a national ISP, so cities in a country, (well known DCs and our own)
and pops in buildings in funny locations

 

Thanks again

 

Saul

 

 

From: Mark Tinka [mailto:mark.tinka at seacom.mu] 
Sent: 20 February 2015 11:02 AM
To: Saul; afnog at afnog.org
Subject: Re: [afnog] naming conventions

 

 

On 20/Feb/15 10:34, Saul wrote:

Hi

I was wondering: are there any best practise documents out there for
naming conventions for routers, switches, cabinets etc?

I know every organisations requirements are different, it's a tricky
subject, but when growing to with equipment an multiple DCs in multiple
geographic locations, things become rather interesting. 

 

Would be happy to hear other peoples experiences that have gone through
this.


In my experience, your choice of naming convention will depend on what
type of network you are.

If you are a global carrier (typically wholesale), it is a little easy.
But if you are regional or local network that mainly deploys network in
several places within a city, and between cities in the same country, this
can get a lot trickier.

For global-centric networks that typically live in well-known data centres
in each city, you can rely on using airport city codes to define the
location, even though you may spread across multiple data centres within
the same city.

For local-centric networks, you're better off developing your own method
of tagging buildings you deploy kit into, as not all of them will be data
centres. Many of them will end up being high-rise building where your kit
is deployed in a dusty old basement with barely enough cooling. In such a
case, you can develop your own naming convention that can be used within
your CRM tool so that Engineering and non-Engineering staff know how to
quickly locate PoP's, e.g., a network I used to work for a couple of years
ago has vehicle license plates broken down by state, where the first
letter in the license plate signifies the state in which the car was
registered. Then, the name of the building (not necessarily a data centre)
into which kit was deployed was given a meaningful abbreviation (which
would also include numbers if necessary) down to a fixed number of
characters. The final construct would be:
    
        building_abbrevation_license_plate_state_first_letter

So let's say your car was registered in Acme state, and the license plates
from Acme state start with the letter "A" (AJN 1234S being the license
plate, for example), and that you're deploying kit in a building called
Boistrous which is codified as "bois", the final PoP name would become:

        boista

So your device name for that location would become:

        cr-01-boista.domain.name ==> as an example

I could get into a lot of detail for either scenario, but as a first stab,
this is the general idea. In essence, for networks that deploy densely in
a single country, codifying your own names for buildings (even for
well-known data centres) scales better, since the majority of your network
won't be in data centres.

Mark.

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