LincolnBlogs

It has certainly been a while since I last posted, so I thought I would find something either interesting or funny to get things going here again. This happens to be funny (I think). I came across this tidbit of information I wrote at work some time ago and thought I would share.

Retired Server Names
Much like sports jersey numbers, some server names are never to be used again… Mostly because they appear to be secretly cursed.

Trinity
I am not sure if there is some sort of bad mojo associated with naming a server with some kind of Godly connotation, but this VMWare GSX server would crash violently almost once an hour at its peak. As far as I know, nobody ever found out what the problem was, and after the name was changed it started working admirably.

Kashmir (pronounced “Cash-mere”)
This was an old RHEL 3.9 or AS 2.1 server that would crash almost as fast as you could start it back up again. We called this server “Crashmere”. The reason I am not sure of the OS level is it was hard to keep it running long enough to check. In it’s defense, I believe it had bad HDD’s before it was finally decommissioned, however, we were too paranoid to try reusing the hardware whether or not we attempted to fix it first.

Odessa
Odessa was, for the most part, our entire early implementation of an Identity Management System. It was based on an out of date and buggy Opensource LDAP and some poorly written custom code from some interns. Consequently it quickly became widely used and relied upon, and never updated as a result. Literally, this was the *beast* the infrastructure team worked to keep fed and happy. Eventually, we moved to a different IDM environment and Odessa was retired, the name never to be used again because we never want to see another single machine gain that much power over anyone again. Odessa is surely the precursor to Skynet.

Guarulhos
This is obvious – Just try and say the name. This is the reason one member of our team is never EVER allowed to pick server names again. We spent over a month trying to pronounce this in conversation until we finally gave up and changed the name outright.

Those are all the good ones I have right now but I am eager to hear any that any of you may have to contribute. Perhaps we could start some master list somewhere and save ourselves and others the tragedy of stumbling upon the reuse of one of these cursed names. 🙂