{"id":99375,"date":"2018-07-31T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=99375"},"modified":"2019-03-13T00:41:05","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T07:41:05","slug":"20180731-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20180731-00\/?p=99375","title":{"rendered":"Server names: One of the remaining places where IT managers can be a little silly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some time ago, ComputerWorld ran a story on <a HREF=\"https:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/article\/2597702\/data-center\/server-names-put-the-fun-in-functional.html\">whimsical names for servers<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>I recall that at my university, one academic department had machines named <i>up<\/i> and <i>down<\/i>. I&#8217;m sure this led to some strange <a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.baseball-almanac.com\/humor4.shtml\"><i>Who&#8217;s on First?<\/i><\/a>-style messages.&sup1; <\/p>\n<p>The early email servers at Microsoft were named after <a HREF=\"https:\/\/muppets.disney.com\/\">muppets<\/a>. I&#8217;m guessing that this came from the term Multiport Transceiver, generally abbreviated MPT and pronounced like the word <i>muppet<\/i>. (Nowadays, we call these things <i>routers<\/i>.) <\/p>\n<p>When the IT department ran out of names of muppets, they started using names of trees. (Mine was <i>ironwood<\/i>.) <\/p>\n<p>Nowadays, the names of the email servers are functional and consequently extremely boring. For example, <i>RED06FT010<\/i> is a server located in <u>Red<\/u>mond, and the other digits and letters indicate where the server can be found. Sorry, I don&#8217;t know how to decode the values. I&#8217;ve never needed to visit a server in person. <\/p>\n<p>&sup1; I want to think this was the physics department, and that they had four other servers named <a HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Quark#Classification\"><i>charm<\/i>, <i>strange<\/i>, <i>top<\/i>, and <i>bottom<\/i><\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Usually by establishing a theme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-99375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Usually by establishing a theme.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}