RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)
This kind of naming is fine for small projects, and personal setups. In professional settings I would suggest using descriptive names and rely more on DNS.<p>It&#x27;s not that I don&#x27;t enjoy fun and personal naming schemes, it&#x27;s just that it&#x27;s a constant annoyance when dealing with a large number of different systems.<p>We&#x27;ve been hired to deal with different companies, who picks some random naming, cars, athletes, plants, cities and so on and it&#x27;s confusing as hell. How am I suppose to remember that Ford and Volvo are your two web servers? Now I need to maintain a list mappings for your servers and look them up every time I need to change your web configuration. Just call them prod-web01.company.com and prod-web02.company.com, it&#x27;s fine and everyone will be able to guess what those servers do.<p>You can also do web01.prod.company.com and web01.test.company.com, but while it looks cleaner (and I personally prefer it) is does hide the &quot;prod&quot; or &quot;test&quot; in most shells, so you constantly need to check that you&#x27;re not messing with a production box.