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After many, many nights spent tracking down servers named after:

Indian food dishes (30 of em! "where is jalfrazie?") Great US mountains (ugh.) 'win2003' the Sun box (ugh again. don't name the box after the OS running on it...)

...i'd say my favorite was 'appname-colo-number#-rackunit#-rack#.airportcode.yourdomain'. This way, the db server in your new york colo JFK1 is easily found in rack unit 20 of rack #5 (db01-20-5.jfk1.example.com).

Once you have +200 servers, having physical location and role mapped to the hostname is a game changer. Even better would be having just a six digit hex hash that you could look up in a noc dashboard.

Note that all that other cutesy stuff is fine as a CNAME, but the FQDN might as well be made significant since it needs to be unique anyway.



I can see mapping physical location to hostname being a problem though, especially in a virtual environment.

Even if you're not doing any of that, it only takes one move and you have to rename your systems, a process that is varying degrees of tricky.




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