1.2 KiB
Hostnames
History
For my setups in my locations, I decided to use a simple "A, B, C" approach since the amount of servers I have in posession is quite small compared to setups that are running in private clouds such as AWS or GCP.
I'm unlikely to have more than 26 servers in one location. (and if I do I should probably go touch some grass).
Problem
This "ABC" scheme had served me well for over a year but it felt very clinical to SSH into "{location}-a".
I realized that I missed the fun of actually naming a server. When a server has a real human names, suddenly they take on a personality. If a server is being difficult when rolling out a deployment, it's fun to think "Oh that's good ol' Betsy having a moment".
Solution
What I ended up with is to still use names such as "copenhagen-a" as a primary hostname with services such as prometheus and tailscale referencing that name to keep configs simple and readable.
However, I set the actual hostname on the machines to include a name starting with the letter of the server that is local to the geographical location. In copenhagen-a's case that would be "copenhagen-aksel".
This makes them way more fun to play around with. The names being local to the geographical area make them feel unique.