Sorry for the delay; I've been traveling and neglecting my lists. on Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 10:47:28AM -0500, Paul Stewart wrote: > With many changes going on this year in our network, I figured it's a > good time to revisit our naming conventions used in our networks.
I study PTR naming conventions as part of my Enemieslist project; it turns out that genericity in naming is highly correlated to bot spam, so some folks find my patterns useful to block and/or score inbound mail for risk of being bot-originated. As such, I've written a few rants about /poor/ naming practices that you may find useful and/or amusing, as well as a few pointing out the rare /good/ naming practices. (See below) In a nutshell, it boils down to this: - note static/dynamic hosts in the name, in the furthest-right-hand token possible (dyn.example.net, not dyn-foo-1-2-3-4.ny.ny.example.net). - cute and funny are not useful to others trying to decide whether to block services originating from a host; clarity and forethought and transparency are. - use different conventions for different services, this helps us differentiate dialup from dsl from cable and other infrastructure; don't assume everyone will do a whois lookup to find out this block is all consumer dsl and this other one is fixed business class. - be consistent, for the love of all that is good and holy. I've got over a hundred patterns for vsnl.net.in *alone*. There are a couple of IDs that discuss naming, in the anti-abuse context: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-reverse-mapping-considerations-06 http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-msullivan-dnsop-generic-naming-schemes-00.txt Here's what I've had to say on the matter over the years: DHCP doesn't necessarily mean dynamic http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/09/dhcp_doesnt_nec.html annoying-stupidity.volia.net http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/08/annoyingstupidi.html A few thoughts on reverse DNS / PTR naming http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/a_few_thoughts_1.html Basic principles of DNS and their discontents http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/basic_principle.html http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/basic_principle_1.html http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/basic_principle_2.html Today's DNS Spotlight: Eircom http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/todays_dns_spot.html A couple more: kudos, and mixed kudos/gripe http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/a_couple_more_k.html Principles http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/2009/06/principles.html There's a few dozen more in the gripes archive: http://enemieslist.com/news/archives/gripes/ HTH, Steve -- hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2553 w: http://hesketh.com/ antispam news and intelligence to help you stop spam: http://enemieslist.com/
