Why are there no GeoDNS solutions anywhere in sight?

Constantine A. Murenin mureninc at gmail.com
Thu Mar 21 16:39:27 UTC 2013


On 21 March 2013 05:23, Graham Beneke <graham at apolix.co.za> wrote:
> On 21/03/2013 09:23, Constantine A. Murenin wrote:
>> On 20 March 2013 21:29, Masataka Ohta <mohta at necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp> wrote:
>>> Constantine A. Murenin wrote:
>>>
>>>> Why even stop there:  all modern browsers usually know the exact
>>>> location of the user, often with street-level accuracy.
>>>
>>> If you think mobile, they don't, especially because "often" is
>>> not at all "enough times".
>>
>> Are you suggesting that geolocation is inaccurate enough to misplace
>> Europe with Asia?
>
> I don't think that it is even a suggestion. It is trivially achievable:
>
> I have a transit provider which is a US based company. They route a
> small slice of their IP space to us over the transit link...
> at their PoP in London...
> where I pick it up and route it to Johannesburg.
>
> All the while - geolocation is convinced those IPs reside in the
> hometown of my transit provider.
>
> I also know of many people who use VPNs to intentionally goelocate
> themselves somewhere other than their real location in order to get
> around certain content filtering.

Your two examples are quite the opposite of each other, I don't know
if this was your intention.

In the first case, when a US-based (and/or ARIN issued) address space
is moved to Europe or Africa, a server-based geoloc would result in
suboptimal results, but a client-based geoloc would very likely
provide sought-after results.

In the second, VPN case -- exactly the opposite -- server-based would
work great, client based would be suboptimal.

Does it show that geoloc is hard to get right?

Yes.

But what I don't understand is why everyone implies that the status
quo with round-robin DNS is any better.

C.




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