Computer name & AD naming scheme

[alternapop]

I’m looking for info from those of you who have entered all of your Mac clients into AD.

What Computer naming scheme are you using? and how did you come to that conclusion?

The employees name? Computer location? MAC address?

It seems like using any of these provides pros and cons and I’m trying to decide which works best for us.

I realize that it needs to be 15 characters or less…

Thanks,
Chris

[PERTnet]

Chris,

I would advise using whatever scheme your windows computers use. Doing so will preserve continuity in your AD administration and be one less reason to make special Macintosh exceptions. Your Windows admins will appreciate that. No solution is prefect, and yes, there are pros/cons in every case.

Where I’m at now, we set the Sharing > Computer Name to an abbreviation of the department (ADV for Advertising) and then a sequential number, 001 and up. That then becomes the AD Computer name ADV-001. Hopefully the machine stays in Advertising. If it moves to Sales, I gotta change the name and rebind with new name.

If you go even more generic like MAC address, serial number or asset tag number, you don’t need to worry about it again.

I use the Sharing > ARD Info fields 1-4 for things like user name, location etc., that’s easy to see and report from in ARD.

Darrin

[Patrick Gallagher]

Our naming convention is 3 parts:

1. Three letter dept code (such as che for chemistry, psy for psycology, etc.)
2. network ID – 7 character max
3. # that indicates machines purpose sequentially and type of hardware, 01A is a faculty/staff primary desktop Mac, 01P is PC, 01M is pc laptop, 01i is mac laptop, then we go up in #’s from there for those that have more than 1 machine. Lab/classrooms start a 11.

Example faculty/staff primary desktop mac would be col-pgalla2-01a
Example classroom desktop pc would be che-genchem-11p

So in most cases, we can tell where a computer is or who owns it based only on it’s computer name without having to dig into our inventory.

If I had to do it all again, I would probably eliminate the hyphens, sometimes 14 characters aren’t enough for certain classrooms or labs where I would prefer to be more descriptive. But overall, it’s worked out.

[Author]

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