Comment 8 for bug 1287224

While I can grant most of your points, Dave and Julian, for some deployments of MAAS (or even other clouds), there are plenty of cases where random machine names are not very user friendly.

As a compromise, what if this were a configurable option, in the MAAS configuration? Something like:

HOST NAMING SCHEME
 (x) Random, e.g. Xzkmd
 ( ) Enumerated, e.g. node42
 ( ) Random dictionary word, e.g. barley

Where the default is the current status quo (5 random chars). But there's also support for some friendlier options too.

For the dictionary, to Dave's point, I propose that we create a curated list of ~1024 or so adjectives+nouns that are least likely to offend.