Youtube Geolocation

Fri Apr 22 07:12:04 UTC 2011

On Thu, 21 Apr 2011, Dan White wrote:

> We're experiencing very poor quality with You Tube, and it appears we're
> subject to a bad entry within a geolocation database somewhere.

I'm not sure about Youtube, but Google seems to do some some clever but
annoying things with correlating requests going through a recursive
nameserver with the location of those browsers.  If a bunch of browsers in
Atlanta use a recursive nameserver in Los Angeles, Google after a while
seems to start offering that nameserver Google server IPs close to Atlanta
to give back to its clients.

This internet draft might be part of a related work:

     http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-subnet-00

> When we attempt to view videos, the contact comes back to us from IPs like:

I ran into this problem while running a Tor exit node (which seems to
terribly screw with this mechanism) and played with it for a while.  I found
my nameserver being offered Google server IPs all over the globe; one week
it would be London, the next week Germany, then New York, etc.

My problem was first solved by changing my browser to use recursive
nameservers in a different /24 (changing the last octet didn't seem to help)
and later by changing Tor itself to use Google's own 8.8.8.8 nameservers,
which caused the problem to go away for other clients of my nameserver.

Try using nameservers on a different /24 and see if the problem goes away.

                                     -- Aaron