IP->Country Data (RE: ISP's Contact List)

Mon Jun 13 18:55:48 UTC 2005

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Jim McBurnett wrote:

> I'm sure that this made it here before but:
>
> www.analysespider.com/ip2country/ip_country.html

Commercial service when there are several free ones available....

BTW - based on what I can see they are not updating data once per day but 
only once/month. Also having some experience in this matter I highly doubt 
that its much more accurate then what I got - it appears no matter what 
path you take to get the data, it would to a degree be wrong (difference
being which part is wrong). One possible way to resolve some issues could
be to have testing servers placed in several locations and analyze TTL for 
connections to various ips to determine how far its from several servers -
of course it would also not be accurate as ip networks are not necessarily 
interconnecting in the same region (CAIDA did their best with this method
some time ago but have not kept updated data as far as I know).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: william(at)elan.net [mailto:william at elan.net]
> Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 1:40 PM
> To: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: IP->Country Data (RE: ISP's Contact List)
>
>
>
> On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Daniel Senie wrote:
>
>> had wrong info or no info.
>>
>> If you're the ISP, then your answer to your customers is "the web site
>
>> you are going to is using an unreliable method to attempt to determine
>
>> locality from IP address."
>>
>> Then point them at the web site's contact form and suggest they
>> complain to the web site owner.
>>
>> As you've already noted, ARIN got the info correct. I suspect there
>> are multiple vendors attempting to provide IP address to GPS address
>> services. I doubt any of them will be 100% reliable, but clearly there
>
>> is an interest in such services.
>
> FYI - It maybe of interest here to know that completewhois provides this
> data. For determining ip->country placement only RIR data on direct ip
> allocations and assignments is used, so if ip block is listed as having
> been allocated to company with corporate address in Jamaica but is used
> in US, the block will show up as JM. That also avoids issue of having
> others blame me for bad data as algorithm for how its generated is
> easily confirmed with RIR whois and in 98% this does provide
> sufficiently good data. Our lists are regenerated EVERY DAY and
> available at:
>  http://www.completewhois.com/statistics/data/ips-bycountry/rirstats/
>
> Even though I've never promoted this, it actually is getting rather used
> and I've had at least dozen requests this year along to make data
> available though means other then raw text file. So you might as well be
> first to know that 3 days ago this was finished and data is now
> available for verification by dns. You can now do lookup in RBL style to
>  <reverse-ip>.country-rirdata.dnsiplists.completewhois.com
>
> (i.e. for my 216.151.192.1 dns server ip, it would be lookup at
>  1.192.151.216.coutry-rirdata.dnsiplists.completewhois.com)
>
> For TXT lookups it will tell you country code and country name, i.e.
> "US - United States". For RBL "A" lookups it will answer with 127.0.a.b
> where a and b are ascii representation of 1st and 2nd letter of country
> code, so for example for US this would be 127.0.85.89
>
> Complete list of these codes and instructions are at:
>
> http://www.completewhois.com/statistics/data/ips-bycountry/rirstats/READ
> ME
>
> So feel free to use if you like for whatever reasons (and don't complain
> to me if you see wrong data, lookup RIR whois and send corrections
> there).
>
> One last point is as I noted data is based on RIR direct allocations, so
> swips and suballocations are not used. In the future planned is separate
> service and data for experimental use that will be based on SWIP data
> (lowest allocation), however my checks on it show that in too many
> places its even less accurate then RIR direct info.
>
>

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net