Lets say you have a dozen of servers. Lets say you connect to them very often to do some work. You have a very nice and descriptive domain for all your servers. Domain is organized nicely organized.
Now you wish to connect to one of the servers. You are typing
ssh mylovelyserver.somesubdomain.mylovelylongdomain.tld
How much do you like to type such a long address ?
When you are working from one machine, you can set it up, so you can very easy access your servers.
You can use
search somesubdomain.mylovelylongdomain.tld
or
domain somesubdomain.mylovelylongdomain.tld
in your
/etc/resolv.conf
which make your servers accessible just by the host name. Then
ssh mylovelyserver
does the job.When you are feeling really lazy, you can setup some aliases in your shells rc file. Something like
alias ssh-mylove = ssh mylovelyserver.somesubdomain.mylovelylongdomain.tld
can save a few key strokes.That was easy when you were working from the same computer all the time. It would be even easy if you would work from a few computers, where you keep your configurations synchronized.
It is not so easy when you have to connect to your servers from different locations and systems which you are not in control of. You are back to typing all that lovely.nice.descriptive.domain.names.
That is why I am opting for a short, not descriptive, easy to type domain names. Which you will use for fast access. Typing
ssh sharp.yllq.net
is much quicker than
ssh sharp.somesubdomain.mylovelylongdomain.tld
Have you tried to dictate yours servers domain location over the phone ? I do it quite often, and believe me, even it the domains make sense for you, they might be confusing for people and longer domains are asking for more mistakes. it is easier to say s-h-a-r-p.y-l-l-q.n-e-t than s-h-a-r-p.s-o-m-e-s-u-b-d-o-m-a-i-n.m-y-l-o-v-e-l-y-l-o-n-g-d-o-m-a-i-n.tld just to make sure person at the other end of the phone got it right.
