Julian Diaz

@hrabbit Renaming a *nix server is easy when you're running your own datacenter, yes. It's hard when you're running a Windows server, and not even possible with AWS or Google Compute Engine instances without recreating them. In an environment like yours, though, it's one of those cases where it actually is practical to use location & role.

The real point here is really to just make sure you're abstracting the name away from the things about the server that do change.

I don't like using numbers at all because they're hard for us humans to remember - the whole identity aspect is lost there. It's at least better to merge a bunch of themes together than to start using numbers (start with Star Wars characters, move on to Star Trek, then Babylon 8, etc...) . Getting attached to a server because it's named after your favorite character might even be a good thing; we don't want them to get hurt and go down! :)

What happens when you realize the hardware you provisioned for your web servers is better for a database role? lpcaweb-01 is an unfortunate name in that case. That's the exact kind of situation I try to avoid.

PS: Your orchestration software should be able to group servers without having to rely on the hostname.

Some more for you:

awk: mini programming language, can do a lot especially if you're good with regexes

find: POWERFUL once you learn the command line switches

cmatrix: absolutely useless