Yep, this is my position. As soon as you do it, people are going to (1) try and squeeze more stuff in and then (2) the names become configured somewhere and diverge from whatever the original purpose was.
Another requirement is you want the names to be a sparse address space: there should never be confuse-able or mistypable characters which drop you into another computer name - so systems like r0001, r0002, r0010 etc. should be right out.
Finally you also want the name to be human pronounceable: if everything's going well, it'll never be said. When things are not going well though, you want it to be something that can be communicated verbally if you need to - i.e. over the phone, or across an office.
Hence, word-lists are ideal as hostnames. Keep them short to around 2-3 syllables. They must be meaningless (and thus also not imply meaning). Any other information you need should come out of the CMDB. If you need more specific info hanging around, then you DNS and CNAME's to set up aliases for things like trying to SSH into "the machine at these rack coordinates" and keep that information updated from your CMDB.
I agree with everything you said here. I also have another rule: I never reuse a machine name. If a machine gets retired, the name it had is retired along with it.
I started doing that after a hard-to-diagnose problem that resulted from restoring a configuration file that referred to a machine that had been retired, but the name was reused, making it refer to the wrong machine.
Another requirement is you want the names to be a sparse address space: there should never be confuse-able or mistypable characters which drop you into another computer name - so systems like r0001, r0002, r0010 etc. should be right out.
Finally you also want the name to be human pronounceable: if everything's going well, it'll never be said. When things are not going well though, you want it to be something that can be communicated verbally if you need to - i.e. over the phone, or across an office.
Hence, word-lists are ideal as hostnames. Keep them short to around 2-3 syllables. They must be meaningless (and thus also not imply meaning). Any other information you need should come out of the CMDB. If you need more specific info hanging around, then you DNS and CNAME's to set up aliases for things like trying to SSH into "the machine at these rack coordinates" and keep that information updated from your CMDB.