Workstation Names 2

[walle]

Hello,

I have to review the computernames in a Windows 2000 Network. Now each computer is named after the person who works on it (username).
Is there a standard or is there any kind of documentation to name the computers on a network?
It's my objective that the computers need to be managed in a easy way.
There must be a good overview of the worstations.
There are 9 domains on 7 different locations. My company has 258 Workstations.

Thanks

 

[MIScoord]

There was a thread about this earlier in the week in one of the forums (maybe the NT 4.0 forum, I can't remember) that had a lot of good suggestions.

We're about to go through the same thing at my place when we replace servers in a couple of months. We have about 75 workstations spread across seven locations, and we have a hodgepodge of names for them, anything from the person's actual name to generic stuff like "Work17."

Here's my tentative plan for how I will attack the renaming:

-- For workstations at the main location that are job specific, I'll probably name them by job title (e.g. PRESIDENT&CEO, VPMARKETING, MISCOORDINATOR).
-- For workstations where the user has someone else with a similar job at another location, I'll probably use a two or three digit code to designate location, followed by a condensed job title (e.g. KPQA, BYSPTECH).
-- For workstations in labs, I'll probably use the location deesignator, followed by the lab title, followed a position number (e.g. BYSP1).

I think this system will work for us, because we don't have a huge network, none of our locations have multiple floors, our offices don't bounce around and we don't have duplicate job titles at any location. If you are faced with that, then you might want to think about using actual office numbers along with a location indicator (e.g. NY754 for a computer in New York, on the seventh floor of the building in office 54). This might be a problem to keep up with, though, if some of those workstations have shared resources (like a printer or a hard drive). Also, if you are going to have multiple servers at the different locations, you want those to be VERY identifiable (e.g. NYPRTSVR for a print server in the New York office).

I guess what I'm saying is that whatever works for you is what you need to use. At the same time, I would HEAVILY document whatever convention you use, so that if you leave, the next guy in your job doesn't have to spend hours trying to figure out which computer is what (like I did).

 

[Hokey]

From my experiance, the naming convention all depends on your situation.

I have worked on a small LAN of aobut 50 PCs. Each PC only had one user, never changed users unless a person quit, and was completely rebuild when a person did quit. We used the user name for the computer name and it worked great.

My current LAN started out with about 150 PCs but has quickly grown into about 400 PCs. We started out by labeling them with their username, but the turn over rate was so high and almost always un-announced that we started to change the nameing to department/location. This quickly fell apart due to again un-announced moving of offices and personell switches between departments. So now we are naming all of our systems with the inventory tag informaion. Each PC is set up exactly the same (Windows 2000, Office 2000, and the exact same NTFS/Policy settins). We then setup a intranet web database of all of our PCs that correlate inventory tag to department, user, specs, etc. This is a hassle, but so far has worked better than the other two ways for our particular situation.

For your situation, I would definately put the name of the location or a code to signify the location in the computer name ... other than that it will all depend on how much/little control you have over your PCs, company turn-over rates, how resources are shared (workstation or only servers), etc

Good luck

 

[MIScoord]

I'd be interested to know how someone in a large corporate environment -- say more than 1,000 computers, multiple application, database servers on multiple sites -- handles this. I would imagine it's nothing short of a nightmare.

 

[Cryptospy]

Re: Large Corp's naming systems.

They probably revert to something similar to what Shaw@home wants you to use for your computer name. IE CS2094123. For the servers, I have always beleived in having a theme... for example, space shuttle names, or famous scientists. At one small location, I named the server "Hummer" and the workstations "Sierra, Lariat, etc etc".

Cryptospy