[jimmcslim]

Perhaps the question 'how do you name your servers?' should be added to tech interviews, the more cutesy the response, the less mature/experienced the interviewee possibly is (i.e. having not been burnt by the obfuscation of such as scheme)?

[blibble]

I don't buy this logic.

Renaming machines is a pain, and they inevitably end up with more/different stuff on them than was originally intended, then your "helpful" name like pukweb01 (production, uk, web, 01) is worse than "pikachu" (as it's incorrect).

the correct way to do this is to give the machine a name with no meaning (maybe pikachu, maybe box005) and have a list of the services running on each machine, and use DNS for those (say www1/ns1 that CNAMEs to the actual hostname).

personally, I'd argue that anyone that calls machines things like "pukweb01" has had little to no experience with a rapidly evolving system...

[philwelch]

If you're repurposing the machine anyway you might as well totally wipe and reprovision it, right?

[lmm]

Even if both are automated, a full OS reinstall is slower than just installing a new service.

[gmjosack]

Definitely. But why add the overhead over updating DNS/DHCP?

[count]

To always start with a clean environment. Who knows what crud is leftover.

A new job for a machine calls for a new OS install/etc.

[genwin]

The users of the servers need never be burnt by the cutesy names and can remember them easier. So it seems not so clear cut what's better all things considered, especially as the ratio of users to operations folk increases.