I login daily to servers with names like xx.xxxxxxxxxx.berkeley.edu* or xxxxxx.xxxx.berkeley.edu, and it annoys me to no end that in 2007, there’s no standard mechanism for personal namespaces. I want shorthands like q and r6 that allow me to name this small set of machines from whatever terminal I may be using.
Alas, here’s how I solved it:
I have a relatively short domain name (tkho.net), and my dirt cheap webhost (NearlyFreeSpeech.NET) lets me create virtually unlimited CNAME records, allowing me to creating mappings from x.tkho.net, xx.tkho.net, etc to the names of servers that I frequently use. I add tkho.net. to the list of search domains that my DNS resolver checks (if it can’t find the record q., it’ll try q.tkho.net.), and now, ssh tkho@q works perfectly, across all my machines, and ssh tkho@q.tkho.net when I’m not on my machine.
* names removed to protect the innocent.