Naming Conventions Overview

The WOLFTECH domain is designed to be usable by any organization within NC State University. Consequently, special naming considerations are necessary to promote organization, prevent conflicts, and ease delegation.

Most objects within Active Directory are required to have unique name. In addition, it is important that an object’s name indicate its purpose, as well as the organization it belongs to. The following naming standards were developed to help achieve these goals. Please be sure to follow these standards, as any unidentifiable or conflicting objects may be removed.

  • Users – Active Directory requires that all users have unique names. This is achieved by using users UnityID (guaranteed to be unique), and in some cases, special suffixes. https://activedirectory.ncsu.edu/ou-admins/naming-conventions/user-accounts-naming-conventions/
  • Groups – Active Directory requires that all groups have unique names. This is achieved by including the acronym of the department, college, or university that the group belongs to. The table below outlines the naming conventions that should be used for different types of groups on the WOLFTECH domain. https://activedirectory.ncsu.edu/ou-admins/naming-conventions/groups/
  • Computers – Active Directory requires that all computer objects have a unique name. The name should be prefixed with your college or department OU followed by a dash (“-“) and must also not exceed 15 characters. In addition, it is good etiquette to not duplicate another computer’s name in DNS. Please check IPAM to ensure that the name you wish to use has not already been registered in DNS.
  • Group Policies – Active Directory requires that all group policies have unique names. This is achieved by including the acronym of the department, college, or university that the group policy belongs to. The table below outlines the naming conventions that should be used for different types of group policies on the WOLFTECH domain. https://activedirectory.ncsu.edu/ou-admins/naming-conventions/group-policy/
  • Organizational Units – Active Directory does NOT require organizational units to have unique names. The only naming requirement for OUs is that they clearly indicate their purpose. There is, however, a default OU organization structure that is created for each new departmental OU. OU Admins are free to change, or even scrap, the default setup within their departmental OU if it does not meet their needs. Above the departmental OUs, the WOLFTECH domain has a rigid OU architecture. To learn more, see OU Architecture Overview and Detailed Architecture.
  • Infrastructure Servers – Infrastructure Servers or servers that support campus or domain wide services  should use the following naming convention when naming servers. Exceptions may be made for servers that cannot follow the naming convention and must be approved by the AD Service Team group.
    • WT-<service><role>-XYY, where X is datacenter &  YY are succession numbers