Using RIR info to determine geographic location...

Thu Dec 20 06:48:44 UTC 2007

At 08:44 PM 19-12-07 -0500, Drew Weaver wrote:

I too would be interested to know how others feel about the various 
geo-location services available to speed things along.  Three that come to 
mind are Akamai, Neustar/Ultradns and the "roll your own" Cisco GSS 
4492R.  How do they stack up?  How good are the various Maxmind files?

Thanks,
Hank

>         Is this becoming a more common or less common practice as we 
> slide ourselves into the last week of 2007? The reason I am wondering is 
> we have noticed some 'issues' recently where correct info in the RIR 
> causes very inefficient and sometimes annoying interaction with some of 
> the world's largest online applications (such as Google) lets say for 
> example that a customer in India purchases dedicated server or 
> Co-Location hosting at a HSP in the United States [very common]. So the 
> RIR shows that the customer is in India, so when the customer interacts 
> with any google applications google automatically directs this traffic to 
> google.in (or the India version of whichever app)....
>
>         More unfortunate than this fact, is the fact that it appears that 
> services and application providers such as google are caching RIR data 
> for an "unknown" amount of time. Which means that if a service provider 
> SWIPs an allocation to a customer (lets use the same example... again in 
> India) (say a /24) to a user, and then that user subsequently returns 
> that allocation and the service provider re-allocates in smaller blocks 
> to different customers in say /29, /28.. et cetera... the problems 
> related to this issue are compounded (30 customers being affected, 
> instead of one...) by this caching...
>
>         Obviously providing RIR information is the responsibility of 
> service providers (it is even ARIN's policy) has anyone else in the 
> community ran into issues such as this and found solutions or workarounds?
>
>Happy holidays to all on NANOG :D
>
>Thanks,
>-Drew