[SAC] DNS domain for telascience servers

[Daniel Morissette]

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Benjamin Thelen wrote:
> 
>> Daniel Morissette schrieb:
>>
>>> I see that our machines at telascience are given names directly under 
>>> the root of the telascience.org domain, without any distinction from 
>>> any other telascience servers.
>>>
>>> To keep things organized and keep our stuff distinct from other 
>>> telascience servers, should we use a separate domain (e.g. osgeo.net 
>>> which is currently unused AFAIK) or at least a subdomain of 
>>> telascience.org (e.g. osgeo.telascience.org) for all those machines?
>>>
>>> I apologize if this has been discussed before I joined the group.
>>>
>>> Daniel
>>
>>
>>
>> According to a mail between Frank and auke at collab.net, some days ago, 
>> it is easy to assign subdomains of osgeo.org, thus I'm a suprised, 
>> that for example geodata.telascience.org has been assigned to 
>> 198.202.74.216, instead of geodate.osgeo.org. Did I miss sth.?
> 
> 
> Daniel / Benjamin,
> 
> I believe that John added geodata.telascience.org as a convenience.
> We can't use geodata.osgeo.org for the machine yet, since that is
> delegated to the CN project pages for the geodata committee.
> 

Even if you had full control on osgeo.org I would advise against using 
geodata.osgeo.org since the top level under .osgeo.org is already used 
for project names so we should not pollute that level with machine 
names. My opinion is that we should try to plan a little bit for the 
future and put machine names under their own subdomain, either osgeo.net 
or osgeo.telascience.org as I previously suggested, or use a sub-domain 
of osgeo.org if we want machine names under that domain, for instance 
.ts.osgeo.org (ts being short for telascience). A subdomain such as 
.ts.osgeo.org could be delegated to a DNS server managed by John or 
someone outside of CN to keep things real simple. If we don't start 
putting some order then the .osgeo.org domain will be quite a mess in a 
few years.

The same way I think we should come up with a standard for assigning 
user ids for people accessing the servers (I believe that's done in the 
LDAP server?) instead of letting everybody use a nickname, otherwise 
we'll end up with a mess there as well. For instance, using first letter 
of firstname + full last name seems to be quite common and could do
(e.g. dmorissette, fwarmerdam, etc.). I'd be open to any other 
convention as long as we have something.

I don't claim to have a perfect solution, but I'm a bit worried by the 
lack of order in the way we do things right now. My experience is that a 
naming convention for domain/server infrastructure is as important as a 
coding style for code: it will make things much more predictable, 
manageable and usable in the long run.

Sorry for throwing another 0.02$ on this, hopefully it's the last time...

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/