Name resolution is one of those things I see as being often overlooked by many admins, especially on small networks where things like WINS and Active Directory are used in its place. Forward and reverse name resolution is an organizational tool that should be used to help resolve network issues quickly and easily. Reducing the need to fumble around with long IP addresses and users reciting them over the phone to you.

In conjunction with host naming schemes and asset tagging is one way to do some public relations to your users. If you can ask them to give you just that information clearly labeled on the front of their machine it will put their mind at ease. In a large portion of my experience there is a certain amount of hostility towards IT staff, and I place blame for this squarely on the shoulders of disorganized admins. The last thing you want is to appear out of control or incompetent to an already frustrated person. Organization is a penny wise, and a pound smart.

Previous to domain management systems and LDAP backends I constructed a system that help domain information in a MySQL database. This would be queried hourly by a series of BASH scripts that would generate the host files for domains. Only the domains that had updates would be pushed to BIND for a reload. This reduced the user input errors and allowed a publicly addressable system via web browser to examine the current host configuration.