Router and interface naming convention survey

Mon Nov 7 16:16:52 UTC 2011

Joe,

> I am doing a survey to see what naming conventions are used for routers and router interfaces as part of a measurement study

On a related note, you might be interested in a study we did a few years ago about errors in naming router interfaces, where a router in one location has a name suggestive of a different location (e.g., because a network administrator did not update the DNS entries for the interface names).  See

  Ming Zhang, Yaoping Ruan, Vivek Pai, and Jennifer Rexford, "How DNS misnaming distorts Internet topology mapping," Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, May/June 2006.
    http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jrex/papers/dns06.pdf
    http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jrex/talks/dns06.ppt

In particular, we found that a few "errors" in the DNS names for router interfaces could lead to significant distortions in measurement studies -- e.g., a study might wrongly conclude that path inflation is very high because traceroute measurements wrongly suggested that the traffic traverses a particular sequence of cities...

Best wishes...

-- Jen