Like a lot of things, people can remember names of things better than numbers. Genes for example, it’s easier to remember their names lz, wnt, than their associated gene Id number. But like stars and many other things there are too many to give each a unique name.
Naming can make sense, our old cluster was named after orchestra parts. When you logged In you where placed on the lobby. The machines where clustered (violin01, violin02, tuba01) and grouped by function types (percussion were the web servers)
New cluster it’s login01,login02
, the work cluster names I don’t remember...
On the other hand, I really hate code names for software versions... I can never remember which name is which version. I wish everyone would just say “16.04” and “18.04”, that makes it really obvious which version cam before the other one.
I never bothered to figure out if Ubuntu kept parts of the name between the 16.04 and the 16.10 version, or if they just used the next letter in the alphabet.
The iso images are numbered (ubuntu-server-16.04.02-x64.iso or whatever) thankfully, so i have 4 ubuntu templates - "leaving LTS this year", the next two LTS, and whatever the 9 month version is currently (20.10 being the current 9 month version)
Thankfully qemu/docker/lxc have made "freezing" a stable, working machine at 16.04 (or even 14.04 if you had the foresight to set it up on qemu at least) - but now i have tons of naming issues. We use a pooled hypervisor system, so sometimes i name things after which pool "server" they are on because i will spin two vms on different servers in the pool with the same VM name (say asterisk-voip) but when you log in it will say asterisk-pve2 or asterisk-wok3 as a quick "hint" as to when i actually "finished" installing it.
for DNS i only name stuff when an "app" requires it either for TLS/SSL or whatever reason. I don't maintain a real DNS server anywhere, and i really should, but i don't like naming things for literally all of the reasons hashed over by everyone in this thread!
Everything in our system is named <purpose><number>.<location>, but that is because everything is set up automatically by provisioning systems that way. We have thousands of servers in hundreds of data centers, so it the only time you ever go to a particular machine is to debug something.
I'm assuming (based on reading how they performed grouping) that percussion01 didn't exist, but perhaps cymbal01 did (since a cymbal is a type of percussion instrument). Therefore cymbal01 would be a web server of sometime. The benefit to naming it this way is you could have multiple types of web servers (internal, dev, prod) and by using a more generic name you could more easily change the function of that web server (so cymbal servers could be dev, then move to prod, without needing a name change).
My feeling, though, is that you care more about the function of a machine than the physical machine itself. Why not change the machine name when you change it’s purpose? There is no reason you need to know that the current prod web server used to be the dev server.
Naming can make sense, our old cluster was named after orchestra parts. When you logged In you where placed on the lobby. The machines where clustered (violin01, violin02, tuba01) and grouped by function types (percussion were the web servers)
New cluster it’s login01,login02 , the work cluster names I don’t remember...