== The downside of distinctive hostnames

Recently a co-worker pointed out that the downside to giving machines
[[distinctive hostnames NamingMachines]] is that users become attached
to them, and when you introduce newer, better machines the users don't
migrate to them. Once I thought about it, this made sense; after all,
by naming things we make them distinct, and thus no longer quite so
generic and equivalent.

(At this point I am tempted to think thoughts about brand loyalty
and the distinctiveness of brand logos.)

One contributing factor is that with many generic naming schemes it is
very easy to derive a bunch of machine names from a single memorized
one. If I remember 'cluster3' I can easily predict that there is
probably a 'cluster5' I can also use; the same is not true of a name
like 'epoch'.

In hindsight, I've seen this behavior in action before, for example at
times when users are slow to migrate from a loaded server to a less
loaded one. I even do this myself; I have no idea of which of our Linux
login servers is less loaded or faster, I just use the one I found
first.

(As it turns out, I probably didn't pick the best one.)

However much I like distinctive hostnames, I was forced to admit that my
co-worker had a convincing argument, so our future user visible generic
machines are probably going to have generic names. (At least we won't
have to come up with a suitable naming scheme.)

(Server machines that users don't use directly will probably keep
getting distinctive names.)