The unique name for the physical machine's A record and everything else as a CNAME is overly complex.<p>Just having the server type and location should be enough to maintain thousands of servers without losing one. Most machines will have other unique identifiers in the hardware you can use for inventory that is not editable, so are better suited for such uses.<p>I also disagreed with the zero padding as it limits the total number of servers per type to 100, but that's a personal preference.<p>If people are concerned about running multiple services on one box, and you don't want to run the same service across all boxes of that type, you could use IP aliases referring to the different type and host it on the machine. If the machine's role changes, change the hostname and DNS.<p>There are a couple of instances I've encountered where CNAMEs don't work whereas A records do, but I can't think of where that happened to me so I can't back up that argument.