What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)

What's the story behind the names of Cloudflare's name servers? (2013)(blog.cloudflare.com)

41 points by aragonite 3 days ago | 40 comments

I started on a new team once and I was integrating some CloudFlare services, I hooked a domain name and I was assigned a nameserver with my lastname and one with my new manager's lastname... nobody ever believed I did not picked those, people still joke about a love story that involves a manager, myself and CloudFlare.

TimByte 1 minute ago | |

Somewhere in Cloudflare's DNS system, a random number generator briefly became the office matchmaker

yreg 7 minutes ago | |

You are not Woz, right?

majke 1 hour ago |

If you want to know more about the cache invalidation in the whole pipeline of DNS requests, take a look at this

https://blog.cloudflare.com/tld-glue-sticks-around-too-long/

I hinted there how the NS chain of lookups works from . to your domain. The point is that we wanted to be able to move name servers around the ip addresss, but that wouldn't work for many domains. So - in some contexts moving IP's rapidly is possible, in some it's not. Fun.

bantunes 1 hour ago |

"Naming strategies for servers" seems like a big enough niche for there to exist a compendium somewhere already, but I couldn't find a good one.

hcaz 1 hour ago | |

I always refer to https://namingschemes.com/Main_Page

jaggederest 7 minutes ago | | |

Good to see I'm probably not the only one who worked with a monstrous single database for all the things named "Yggdrasil", and a job server that was seemingly constantly trying to take it down named "Nidhogg".

jimnotgym 36 minutes ago | | |

For LAN servers, I used to name my Linux machines after penguins. It seemed apt, made me smile, especially when new people came on board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_penguins

The Windows and Solaris boxes had numbers before i got there. A new guy started moving them to a name that included the os version like 'server-2008' in it. Never really liked that

vermilingua 1 hour ago | | |

Fantastic, I have long used Culture Ship names [0] to name my devices but this is a far easier list to reference than others online

[0] https://namingschemes.com/Culture_Ships

voidUpdate 1 hour ago | | |

Could do with having Minecraft Blocks instead of just Minecraft Materials, that's what I use for my home network

gear54rus 8 minutes ago | | |

https://namingschemes.com/Physical_Injuries lol

thelastgallon 1 hour ago |

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: naming things and cache invalidation. Cloudflare writes about how it deals with the first one.

aa-jv 1 hour ago | |

3 hard things: you missed counting things.

Stratoscope 1 hour ago | | |

The classic version...

There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off by one errors.

hcaz 1 hour ago |

As always https://xkcd.com/910/

cynicalsecurity 48 minutes ago |

Vatican server names sounded somewhat interesting too: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. They set up their own ISP and cloud hosting since then, but it was a funny gig they did in the past.

HariPavan 51 minutes ago |

I love these kinds of stories.

LoganDark 29 minutes ago |

> One side note on this point: we once had someone write in to support criticizing us based on the fact that our name server convention is hetro-normative. I will simply say that just because you get two name servers doesn't mean they're in any kind of relationship.

I mean, you could add 50 gender-neutral names to try to balance it out...

There are infinite genders though, so it's not really fair to go beyond that.

Traubenfuchs 1 hour ago |

Just make it a uuid or some other kind of random a-z0-9 string to avoid all this whimsy and nuisance?

voidUpdate 1 hour ago | |

What's wrong with whimsy?

Traubenfuchs 1 hour ago | | |

It leads to friction and required follow up extra work, as explained in the article.

GuB-42 1 hour ago | |

These names are for humans to remember and to type-in, not just for computers. And whimsy names are more memorable, which is a good thing. Random strings are for computers, not humans.

fnoef 1 hour ago |

This is so cringe. I feel like software engineers are just overgrown toddlers stuck in kindergarten: "We named our servers with boy and girls names and hired an artist to draw their personalities as ninjas!!@!111". I mean, whats wrong with a plain old 4 character hash or whatever?

account42 11 minutes ago | |

Agreed, sounds like Cloudflare is adult daycare. I see it as a sign that these companies have more money to waste than they should have in a functioning competitive market.

xnickb 1 hour ago | |

What's wrong with this? They have resources and desire to make their work fun. What happened to wanting to enjoy what you're doing?

fnoef 1 hour ago | | |

The wrong in this, is the extent they went to with this. I mean, name your servers whatever you want, but hiring an artist to draw the servers personalities and then writing a blog post about this? Like common, that's something a child would do about their favorite toy. At some point, people need to grow up.

And I guess the other "wrong with it" is the fact that it just wastes human potential. Build robust software and take pride in this, not it naming your servers bob and lola.

onesandofgrain 1 hour ago | | |

Maybe they should spend more time keeping their servers from crashing lol, and less on nameserver-namings

whstl 1 hour ago | |

As someone slightly older than average here, one of the perks of maturity for me is not caring much about what others think anymore. Childish or cringe are fine.

But I don’t judge you: being a teenager or a young adult and rejecting such things is a rite of passage that we all go through.

CodesInChaos 1 hour ago | | |

> When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

― C.S. Lewis

Galorious 1 hour ago | |

Common names are much easier for people to copy over and check. As opposed to a random jumble of numbers and letters.

tonyhart7 59 minutes ago | |

this is why you never get invited on houses party