Quick Hack: Show Which Web Front End is Being Browsed

Had a request yesterday from a customer that needed a quick and dirty way for their admins to tell which Web Front End server was being currently browsed in their multi-server farm. While we probably should have made a special custom control that read a local file or something... they opted instead to just make a simple change to the application.master (after making a backup of course). I'm not a huge fan of editing application.master, but in this instance the change is very minimal.

We added a string like "Web Server 1 > " before the global navigation placeholder, like this:

Web Server 1 &gt; <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderGlobalNavigationSiteMap" runat="server">
<asp:SiteMapPath SiteMapProvider="SPSiteMapProvider" id="GlobalNavigationSiteMap" RenderCurrentNodeAsLink="true" SkipLinkText="" NodeStyle-CssClass="ms-sitemapdirectional" runat="server"/>
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

This basically changes the global breadcrumbs to now look like:

Web Server 1 > Site Name > Subsite Name