Invariant Properties

Anyone who has multiple computers knows that it can become challenging to come up with new system names. I’ve reused several names for over a decade but in those cases it was actually the hard disk that was named!

(The way this worked was that at some point I did a clean install on new hardware but afterwards I either moved the old hard disk into a new barebones system (for faster CPU and more memory) or put a new hard disk into existing hardware. Either way there was clear continuity.)

Today? I just got a new (refurbished) system from Pacific Geek – a sweet little quad-core Xeon server with 8 GB of memory plus a hybrid SSD/hard disk from Newegg, all for under $1000. It will become my primary linux development system but my old system will still be around so I can’t reuse the name.

So what do I name the new system?

I’ve been using Shakespearean names for my last few ‘additional’ systems. Hey, it’s better than naming systems after the cast of Jersey Shore!

For some reason A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems like a good idea.

I was tempted by Oberon but decide against it. I’m not sure why, maybe because it’s so close to the computer’s model (Optiplex 960) and I don’t want to tie names to hardware model because it’s a real pain if you move the disk to a new system. I eventually go with one of the fairies – Mustardseed.

This morning I realize that I really screwed up. My subconscious wanted the fairies since one of the primary requirements for this system is that it support virtualization. Guest OS = fairy. Host OS = king of the fairies.

On the other hand my conscious mind knows that the guest OS will be single-purpose. E.g., it will run one version of a database. Not just postgresql, for instance, but postgresql-8.4. If I want to install postgresql-9.0 I’ll create a new guest OS.

From this perspective a full-fledged system name seems excessive. I can name it by the service it provides, e.g., ‘postgresql84’ or ‘tomcat70’.

There’s still the question of what to name the guest OSes. Do I stay generic and have problems if I want to have multiple instances? Do I include the host OS name and have problems if I migrate the instance to other hardware? Hmm… each has pros and cons.

Complicating this is the secondary goal of experimenting with clouds. What do I the guest OS if it’s born locally but migrated to Amazon? What if I create multiple instances in the cloud, e.g., I play with a single-node factorization engine but want to see what it can do if I create a small cluster on Amazon?