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