Names Hacking Names scheme problems, especially LVM

[ignite 0]

I'd like to have a little talk about names. All of us who stick with IT industry repeatedly deal with
various names, labels, arbitrary strings and such. Starting from variables, procedures and functions names
in programming languages, continuing with logins, users, computers names and finally finishing with passwords
and passphrases.

I notice one interesting fact. At first, when super new cool named thing introduced, the finest in the
universe manual sad: the name of the_thing is arbitrary string consisting of alphanumeric characters and
underscores .... bla-bla-bla. Then everybody begin using this cool the_thing and face inconsistencies,
unsafety and unhandyness while using _arbitrary_ strings as names. After some time appears articles
of various authors with suggestions about best practices in naming schemas. Such as meaningfull variables
names, good passwords which hard to bruteforce but easy to remember and so on.
So, I'd follow this trend and propose my own suggestions.

Some time ago I need to repaire broken linux system. Specifically it was Fedora 5. My working desktop is
Fedora 5 installation too. I installed my desktop using default options: root directory resides in Logical
Volume Manager (LVM) partition which named VolGroup00. This was cool. But. At that time I hav't functional
boot CD or DVD, as I usually prefer network installations. So i did next step: connect hard disk from
broked system to my desktop and seen beautifull thing - that system was installed by default too, so its
root directory resides on LMV wich named VolGroup00! Hah. After boot my system can't see new disk at all.
So I face perfect ideal name conflict. What should I do? I can't rename my LMV volume group because it
mounted. I can't rename new disk's volume group because my LMV software don't see it. Deadlock.
After some googling I found perfect article about this topic http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8874 and
successfully solve my problem.

But after all that troubles I remember one importent thing: never never never use default LVM volume names
suggested by installer. Always rename it to something unique to concrete box. For example for my
(ignite) box I chose igVol name, for server named 'nord' - nrdVol etc.

Happy names hacking.

[Hercco 0]

Heheh! During the years I've been involved in programming I've leart my lessons about naming. You learn where you can expect conflicts but they still tend to happen, in very unexpected place, just like your case. I was in a world of shite when I started to build an unified front page for my site drawing stuff from various partitions of the site. PHP really needs namespaces