GeoIP information

Fri Sep 25 08:23:34 UTC 2015

We have been using Maxmind's open source data set [0] on RIPEstat [1]
now for quite a while and there have been quite many user complaints
about the correctness of the location or the recency of the data.

One reason can be that [0] is updated/released only once a month,
usually beginning of the month. In some cases the Maxmind's online
preview [2] - assuming the underlying data is the paid version - seemed
to be more up-to-date.

Getting BGP topology to geographical location right is not a trivial
task for various reasons of which some were already stated here. From my
experience with Maxmind I think that the RIR's Whois information is a
starting point to bootstrap their database and from there Maxmind uses
ping/traceroute triangulation, change requests... and keep in mind that
Maxmind's main business field is e-commerce which allows them to
correlate requests (IPs from customers) from e-shop site (with known
geographical affiliation).

Since many ISPs seem to suffer from misguided geo-ip information
provided by different providers it would be a huge improvement to have
at least one data set that allows the ISPs to provide location
information to the IP space they own. Few years ago I heard of a project
called OpenGeoFeed [3] but I don't know about its status.

Christian

[0] http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/legacy/geolite/
[1] e.g.
https://stat.ripe.net/widget/geoloc#w.resource=2001%3A67c%3A2e8%3A%3A%2F48
[2] https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-demo
[3] https://www.opengeofeed.org/

On 25/09/15 03:48, Ian Clark wrote:
> Is there anyone here who has successfully changed their GeoIP data for a
> subset of their ARIN allocation?
> How do service providers get all the GeoIP companies to have correct
> information for their address ranges?  Do they just pay them to update it?
> At first I thought it had to do with whois data, but my home Verizon IP
> whois lists Ashburn, VA, yet the GeoIP data shows my local city.
> 
> We're trying to find a way to correct our GeoIP data for a specific IP
> range, but aren't sure what the best practices are for doing so.  Any
> advice would be awesome!
> 