The worst choice we've done in terms of host name was for our server at my uni's robotics lab. The lab itself has a strong Tintin theme, and the various compute

The worst choice we've done in terms of host name was for our server at my uni's robotics lab. The lab itself has a strong Tintin theme, and the various computers continue this tradition, with the (french) names Tournesol, Milou, and... Dupont for a random lab computer, while the production server got Dupond (the english equivalents are Thomson and Thompson). While funny, this isn't extremely practical, especially the first few months, while getting accustomed to it. Nowadays, we prefer to name them after something more meaningful, like Archibald [Captain Haddock's first name, fitting for an Arch machine], Winry, or Delphine (Windows and Debian, respectively). This makes easy to identify the machine and its operating system, which I like including in the host name. Overall, I find that having a clear theme helps (to know we are talking about a computer's name), and clear rules for the naming scheme also help, both for picking the name, and guessing its function/characteristics from the name. I would definitely go with some DNS-based convention like the one @zrm mentioned when having to manage bigger clusters or geographically disparate pieces of equipment, though. I would also disagree with something in this RFC: I don't mind tying a hostname to the host function, as I usually reimage/reinstall the operating system when changing it, making it easy to rename it. This also helps with keeping everything modular enough that it can be quickly installed on a new machine, and prevents "ossification" of the various configuration files. This includes giving a replacement computer the same name as the one being replaced. Finally, when managing a truly dynamic cluster (computers that boot a PXE image with little to no local storage, and take their jobs from a control server), I don't even bother naming them, and will choose something semi-random like the MAC address (even a link-local/DHCP address, or the md5 of one of these). As those are temporary identifiers, they are managed dynamically, and do not need to be remembered.