What do these abbreviations in network hostnames mean?

Question

When I use traceroute, I often see abbreviations in the hostnames along the route, such as "ge", "so", "ic", "gw", "bb" etc. I can guess "bb" means backbone.

Does anyone know what any these strings abbreviate, or know any other common abbreviations?

Answer 1

These are ISO-3166-1 Alpha2 geographical domain id's converted to lower case.

• ge - Georgia
• gw - Guinea-Bisseau
• so - Somalia
• bb - Barbados
• ic - old code for Iceland?

Just look for ISO-3166 for the complete list of country codes. And RFC 1700 for the geo domain list.

Can you please provide the output from one of your traceroutes?

Hostnames using components such as bb for backbone and gw for gateway tend to put those towards the start of a hostname, e.g. bb1.toto.com.au or gw2.wtf.co.uk.

This follows a naming convention of more specfic to less specific elements in the name as you traverse from left to right.

Geographical domains are, almost always, at the end of the hostname.

Answer 2

Short version; Country codes

Likely not totally correct, but...

Answer 3

A comlete listing of country codes is at http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists/english_country_names_and_code_elements.htm Other Top Level Domains (TLD) are at: http://www.icann.org/en/registries/listing.html

Answer 4

The examples you provided makes me think it's not about country codes.

I guess it's just what you thought: ISP network admins using shorcut when naming their servers.

• bb = backbone
• gw = gateway
• ic = interconnect?
• ge = ?
• so = stackoverflow? :)

Answer 5

Unless they are the top level domain name (eg "foo.bb" rather than "bb.example.net"), then they are choosen by the organisation that owns that domain name, remember if you own a domain name, you own all subdomains. In that case, you can call it whatever you want. There's no specification and people call it many different things.

There are many 2 level top level domains, one for each country. E.g. .fr for France. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CcTLD

Answer 6

They're unlikely to be country codes. When you're in charge of a large scale network, you come up with naming schemes that make sense to you, mixing geographical and functional notations, but without being too verbose since it's too wasteful to type.

gw, for example, always stands for gateway. ge typically means "gateway external", i.e. a border gateway to a "friendly" network. ix stands for interchange.

Answer 7

actually, "ge" most likely stands for "Gigabit Ethernet", and it's quite common for the ports on routers to be named after the interface name.

Hence the first Gig-E port on a router will quite often have a hostname that includes "ge0" or similar.

You'll also see:

• "fa" for "Fast Ethernet" (on Cisco routers)
• "s0" for "Serial" (i.e. E1 or T1 ports)
• "lo0" for "Loopback"