This script will randomly generate hostnames by picking words from the provided word list. The pool of words comes from Oren Tirosh's mnemonic encoding project.

Just run the script and provide the number of hostnames you'd like to generate:

$ ./genhost 4
romeo.example.com
holiday.example.com
jester.example.com
spiral.example.com

All of those words will automatically be commented out in the word list and thus removed from the pool of future names. If a hostname has the potential to be confusing based on technical jargon (like email.example.com), simply ignore it and generate a replacement.

If you decommission a server, you can return its hostname to the usable pool, thereby uncommenting it in the wordlist:

$ ./genhost reuse jester

You can also print a list of the hostnames currently marked as in use:

$ ./genhost list
romeo
holiday
spiral

For collaboration purposes, don't forget to commit the updated word list back to a shared Git repository so names do not get reused:

$ git add wordlist
$ git commit
$ git push