Host Names

How do we decide on a name for each system? Again, this is site-specific and may depend on the numbers of machines in use. Often, administrators will try and use a “set” of something, be it a list of their favorite football teams or the names of Snow White's dwarfs (obviously not much use if you have, or are likely to have, more than seven machines!).

We have chosen to base our names on the periodic table of elements. This probably seems like an awkward thing to do (considering the names of some of the elements), but we hope it will help as we progress throughout the book for the following reasons:

• The host addresses will match the atomic number. For example, hydrogen will be 1, helium 2, lithium 3, and so on.

• Each system is allowed a number of names—its host name and a number of aliases. We will use the element name as the primary host name, and the chemical symbol as its first alias. For example, hydrogen will have an alias of “h” and helium will have an alias of “he.” This will allow us to use the alias to easily indicate the particular host in the illustrations throughout the book where space is at a premium!

• This method will be fine for a network of systems of around 100 systems, and although the names can get quite complicated the aliases are very easy to use.

Using this information, we have generated the hosts file shown below and will use this as our current master copy:

hydrogen# cat /etc/inet/hosts
127.0.0.1        localhost    loghost
#
# Main servers and clients on subnet 192.168.22.0
# Supernet mask: 255.255.255.128
#
192.168.22.1     hydrogen    h
192.168.22.2     helium      he
192.168.22.3     lithium     li
192.168.22.4     beryllium   be
192.168.22.5     boron       b
192.168.22.6     carbon      c
192.168.22.7     nitrogen    n
192.168.22.8     oxygen      o
192.168.22.9     flourine    f
192.168.22.10    neon        ne
#
# Gateway machine with two interfaces
# Supernet mask: 255.255.255.128
#
192.168.22.49    indium      in
192.168.44.50    tin         sn
#
# External facing servers on subnet 192.168.44.0
# Supernet mask: 255.255.255.128
#
192.168.44.51    antimony    sb
192.168.44.52    tellurium   te
192.168.44.53    iodine      i
192.168.44.54    xenon       xe
hydrogen#