Is there a canonical way (no pun intended) to describe the purpose of a specific machine?
I have to administer several hosts all with the same hostname ("www"). On the shell prompt i can not distinguish, which machine i am currently working on. I'd like to have a textfile eg. /etc/purpose in which i can put the description of the machine. Of course I could implement this quite easily, but would rather use a standardized solution. By the way, I am currently running ubuntu from 10.04 to 12.04.
www
,ftp
, and others are Well Known hostnames. They should not be the actual name of the server. The server should be named something reasonable for your normal naming scheme (egwww01
or server01, whatever); then the well known name should be an alias (DNS CNAME) to the server responsible for those services. Also, having the server display the whole FQDN instead of just it's PQDN helps.