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What do you do when you have 200+ machines of a handful of different types (database, mail, web, etc.) that you want to have named? Having some sort of organize

What do you do when you have 200+ machines of a handful of different types (database, mail, web, etc.) that you want to have named? Having some sort of organized categorization would be beneficial, but it seems like naming them after 200+ different colors doesn't make life any easier. Naming after the purpose of the box also gets messy if you're not strict about renaming when the machine is repurposed. And if you group by "theme groups" as the RFC suggests, you're still stuck renaming a machine if it's no longer one of your 7 dwarfs (database servers, or whatever). Should the name convey meaning at all, or just be a random label? A developer I know doesn't see the problem with just having the full location (state, data center, rack, rack location), which I'm against, but we haven't been able to agree on a good middle ground approach that scales. Is location data in a name universally bad?

nmcfarl 14y ago
The paper mentions that a numeric suffix scheme works fine if "you have a lot of machines and there are no reasons for any human to distinguish between them". I’d say modern production setup with a ton of configuration managed machines that no one logs into should be named this way. This is more advice for "snowflake servers" and workstations. As for geographic location I had (viewed) a bad experience college when a server in the main server room started DOSing another box in the same room. The culprit was ruled out for a very long while 'cause it’s name claimed that it was all the way across campus - so it couldn’t be the problem. Because of this I’m with the paper on the no geography in names point. Geography in names causes thinking errors in people.