How to pick a slice name

Slice names are public, reusable and unique.

• Public means you should expect that anyone could see the name of your slice.
• Unique means that only one slice with that identifier* can exist in each project at any given point in time.
• Reusable means that once a slice has expired, that slice name may be reused to name a new slice.

In general, slice names should:

• be at most 19 characters
• contain only the following characters: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, - (uppercase and lowercase alphanumeric characters and dash)
• not start with '-' (dash)
• Note: The '_' (underscore) character can not be used.

While enforcement of these rules is not consistent across all parts of GENI, following these rules will ensure compatibility throughout GENI.

Note

Actually, it's the slice URN that must be unique. A slice URN is an identifier that includes both the slice name and the authority that issued the slice. This means that experimenters could request two slices with the same name from two different authorities, but the slice URNs would be unique because they were issued by different authorities.

In practice, you should just know that you can only create one slice with a given name at a time. It also means that generic slice names like "test" or "myslice" are not good choices because they may already be in use by another experimenter.