ipv6 and geolocation

Tue Oct 22 20:17:16 UTC 2013

On 2013-10-22 21:16, Blair Trosper wrote:
> Everyone loves IPv6, and it's a fantastic technology.  However, I've been
> pondering a few quirks of v6, including the low priority of PTR, but I have
> a question I want to throw out there:
> 
> Do you think IPv6 geolocatoin (GeoIP) will ever be viable?

Yes, in the same way as it happens for IPv4: customer types their
address into the database for a geo-provider when they type it in to get
stuff shipped out to them...

Most consumer/hard-line ISPs typically have their users in the same
country/region as they operate, hence geo-location up to city level will
be 'easy'.

For VPN providers or more specifically IPv6-tunnel providers that is not
the case, the user might be in a completely different country than the
PoP is, or where the address space for that PoP comes from.

As such, for SixXS we are using the "Self-published IP Geolocation Data"
specification as defined in this draft by Google folks:
 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-google-self-published-geofeeds-02

This resolves this problem for us. More details about this and where to
find the feed etc can be found at:
  http://www.sixxs.net/faq/misc/?faq=geolocation

As mentioned there, as a content-provider, please use that data, and if
you want do also please send a notification so that we can either list
you on the above page and/or at least notify you in case things change.

Note that most VPN providers actually are more 'geo-location changers'
and thus likely will not want to do this, or will want to "lie" in their
data, for them I don't think that providers will be accepting their feeds.

> What I'm getting at is:  IPv6 geolocation is presently rather hopeless and
> useless.

One very simple approach is to take RIR data, you then end up with a
reasonably accurate location, unless, like in the above detail the
traffic actually is tunneled from somewhere else.

If wanted I can make a geo-feed available containing the data from GRH,
as that has all these little details already anyway. If somebody finds
it useful, give a yell, and I'll kick the system to produce one
(separately from the SixXS specific prefixes of course, thus under a
different URL).

Greets,
 Jeroen