Re: Router and interface naming convention survey

[Jennifer Rexford <jrex () CS Princeton EDU>]

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