Hi all, Can any of you please recommend some IP-to-geo mapping database / web service ? I would like to get resolution down to city if possible. Thanks and Regards, -ashe
GeoIP - http://www.maxmind.com/geoip/ Ashe Canvar wrote:
Hi all,
Can any of you please recommend some IP-to-geo mapping database / web service ?
I would like to get resolution down to city if possible.
Thanks and Regards, -ashe
-- Alain Hebert ahebert@pubnix.net PubNIX Inc. P.O. Box 175 Beaconsfield, Quebec H9W 5T7 tel 514-990-5911 http://www.pubnix.net fax 514-990-9443
<cough> scam_snake_oil_etc </cough> On Mon, 15 May 2006, Alain Hebert wrote: : :GeoIP - http://www.maxmind.com/geoip/ : :Ashe Canvar wrote: : :> :> Hi all, :> :> Can any of you please recommend some IP-to-geo mapping database / web :> service ? :> :> I would like to get resolution down to city if possible. :> :> Thanks and Regards,
I'm not quite comfortable with the idea of building a market audience based on data with at best dubious accuracy. On Mon, 15 May 2006, Martin Hannigan wrote: :At 12:49 PM 5/15/2006, Brian Wallingford wrote: : :><cough> scam_snake_oil_etc </cough> : : :How so?
It works for spammers. - billn On Mon, 15 May 2006, Brian Wallingford wrote:
I'm not quite comfortable with the idea of building a market audience based on data with at best dubious accuracy.
On Mon, 15 May 2006, Martin Hannigan wrote:
:At 12:49 PM 5/15/2006, Brian Wallingford wrote: : :><cough> scam_snake_oil_etc </cough> : : :How so?
Thanks for all your replies. I came across http://www.hostip.info/use.html, which looks good, at least from a API/ ease of use prespective. So how would the illustrious people on nanog solve the folowing issue: + PHB walks into my office and asks for a global distribution of my 500K customers. + Preferably wants a gigantic world map with realtime visualization of where the currently active customers are I can solve the visualization part and the GIS issues. But comes down to the accuracy of the geo-ip database in the end. -ashe On 5/15/06, Bill Nash <billn@odyssey.billn.net> wrote:
It works for spammers.
- billn
On Mon, 15 May 2006, Brian Wallingford wrote:
I'm not quite comfortable with the idea of building a market audience based on data with at best dubious accuracy.
On Mon, 15 May 2006, Martin Hannigan wrote:
:At 12:49 PM 5/15/2006, Brian Wallingford wrote: : :><cough> scam_snake_oil_etc </cough> : : :How so?
In article <c6f8c0e90605151039s1de02575u4520dc0e9867b41b@mail.gmail.com>, Ashe Canvar <acanvar@gmail.com> writes
Thanks for all your replies. I came across http://www.hostip.info/use.html, which looks good, at least from a API/ ease of use prespective.
I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That's quite a long way out in a small country like England. -- Roland Perry
Hostip.info is so bad... One can find the exact location of my ip in the ripe-database and the tool doesn't get it. It claimed that I'm in some sort of 100souls small town altough I'm living in a major city. And hey: I was using an ip out of a hoster's block - not a dialup or something like that. Tssssss
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] Im Auftrag von Roland Perry Gesendet: Montag, 15. Mai 2006 22:06 An: nanog@merit.edu Betreff: Re: Geo location to IP mapping
In article <c6f8c0e90605151039s1de02575u4520dc0e9867b41b@mail.gmail.com>, Ashe Canvar <acanvar@gmail.com> writes
Thanks for all your replies. I came across http://www.hostip.info/use.html, which looks good, at least from a API/ ease of use prespective.
I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That's quite a long way out in a small country like England. -- Roland Perry
RP> Date: Mon, 15 May 2006 21:05:35 +0100 RP> From: Roland Perry RP> I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That's RP> quite a long way out in a small country like England. <me too> Home cable returned "haven't got a clue". I tried a couple other netblocks that returned different places in Florida, Mississippi, and Illinois. Not too good when the correct answers are Kansas and California. </me too> *yawn* Eddy -- Everquick Internet - http://www.everquick.net/ A division of Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - http://www.brotsman.com/ Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 785 865 5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 316 794 8922 Wichita ________________________________________________________________________ DO NOT send mail to the following addresses: davidc@brics.com -*- jfconmaapaq@intc.net -*- sam@everquick.net Sending mail to spambait addresses is a great way to get blocked. Ditto for broken OOO autoresponders and foolish AV software backscatter.
On Mon, 15 May 2006, Roland Perry wrote: > > http://www.hostip.info/use.html, which looks good, at least from a > > API/ ease of use prespective. > > I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That's > quite a long way out in a small country like England. 1.3ms is longer in small countries like England? -Bill
At 10:55 PM 15-05-06 -0700, Bill Woodcock wrote:
On Mon, 15 May 2006, Roland Perry wrote: > > http://www.hostip.info/use.html, which looks good, at least from a > > API/ ease of use prespective. > > I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That's > quite a long way out in a small country like England.
100miles? Is that all? Try 6096 miles! My IP is 132.66.222.13 and it lists it as Beijing, China yet I am in Israel. This IP has never been in APNIC. It has been listed in ARIN and RIPE since 1989 as being Israel so I guess hostip is not the most reliable system to use. -Hank
In article <Pine.SOC.4.61.0605152255040.4154@paixhost.pch.net>, Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net> writes
I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That's quite a long way out in a small country like England.
1.3ms is longer in small countries like England?
I'm virtually certain it's not being done by propagation delay. What they've apparently done is look up the RIPE database, and found that my ISP has registered an address, with postcode, for the hostmaster function. They've reported the major town associated with the two most significant (out of six) characters of that postcode (Hemel Hempstead), although the address is actually in a smaller town twenty miles to the west (Stoke Mandeville). To complicate the issue, the ISP is formed by the acquisition of several smaller ISPs, and it seems unlikely (from my knowledge of the local topology) that the physical NOC is at the hostmaster's address. Finally, the "tail" from the NOC to my house (which appears as one hop) is over a connection into British Telecom's ADSL backbone, and then over the BT internal network which supports their wholesale ADSL product, as far as my local telephone exchange (which I can see out of my office window) and a short length of local copper. There's nothing in either the RIPE database, or timing of packets, which could say where in the country that tail is delivered. The ISP has my billing address, of course. -- Roland Perry
On Mon, 15 May 2006 22:55:40 PDT, Bill Woodcock said:
On Mon, 15 May 2006, Roland Perry wrote: > > http://www.hostip.info/use.html, which looks good, at least from a > > API/ ease of use prespective. > > I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That'
s
> quite a long way out in a small country like England.
1.3ms is longer in small countries like England?
How many milliseconds wide are Luxembourg and Leichtenstein combined?
I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That's
quite a long way out in a small country like England.
I live in London and use BT Broadband. But geolocation shows me being in Ipswich up in East Anglia, a long way from London. I assume this is because the geolocation only knows that I use an IP address from a DHCP pool managed in Ipswich. They don't know anything about BT's own extensive network, and in the case of DSL using tunnels and DHCP servers, the real topology becomes entirely invisible. The end result is that most of England's population lives in Ipswich. Eat your heart out Alan Partridge. A few years ago, while working at a different company in London, I had a New York IP address because our company's internal network Internet gateway was in New York. Then they changed things around so that we used a gateway in London for all the European offices. But that meant that colleagues in France, Germany, etc... would all show up as being located in London. Nowadays, I use a VPN to work from home. The VPN software knows of multiple tunnel endpoint servers so if there is a problem with the UK server it fails over to a server in the USA. My IP address on the Internet comes from the NAT server at the Internet gateway. Depending on where the tunnel endpoint is, it could be a US address or a UK address. 100% accurate geolocation is not achievable but if you understand the issues then you can better make a decision how to apply geolocation services to your own problem. It may work well enough for some things. --Michael Dillon
In article <OF29005D37.D3CCF6C6-ON80257170.00326AD9-80257170.0033DB6B@btradianz.com> , Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com writes
I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That's
quite a long way out in a small country like England.
I live in London and use BT Broadband. But geolocation shows me being in Ipswich up in East Anglia, a long way from London. I assume this is because the geolocation only knows that I use an IP address from a DHCP pool managed in Ipswich.
Martlesham, probably, which has an "Ipswich" postcode.
The end result is that most of England's population lives in Ipswich.
Only BT *Retail* ADSL customers, I'm a wholesale customer via a different ISP, and a different misleading "location". -- Roland Perry
In article <c6f8c0e90605151039s1de02575u4520dc0e9867b41b@mail.gmail.com>, Ashe Canvar <acanvar@gmail.com> writes
Thanks for all your replies. I came across http://www.hostip.info/use.html, which looks good, at least from a API/ ease of use prespective.
I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That's quite a long way out in a small country like England.
Only 100 miles? I entered the address of a box I have in Virginia, and it says it's in California. Well at least it got the country right.
I can solve the visualization part and the GIS issues. But comes down to the accuracy of the geo-ip database in the end.
According to the Brand X localisation database which was rated tops in the Brand Y Web Magazine survey in 2005, our top customers are located in these cities. Who said marketing is not for techies? --Michael Dillon
Well, I'm sure that everybodies here understand that the city databases cannot be accurate more than 50%. The way we disperse static IP on commercial accounts there is not way they can figure out where the destination is. The last best guest will be the peer router before my routers. For me the country db is good enought for basic webalizer report for the customers websites. (This way my customers dont waste queries to countries.nerd.dk on non-spam related things) Have fun... Bill Nash wrote:
It works for spammers.
- billn
On Mon, 15 May 2006, Brian Wallingford wrote:
I'm not quite comfortable with the idea of building a market audience based on data with at best dubious accuracy.
On Mon, 15 May 2006, Martin Hannigan wrote:
:At 12:49 PM 5/15/2006, Brian Wallingford wrote: : :><cough> scam_snake_oil_etc </cough> : : :How so?
-- Alain Hebert ahebert@pubnix.net PubNIX Inc. P.O. Box 175 Beaconsfield, Quebec H9W 5T7 tel 514-990-5911 http://www.pubnix.net fax 514-990-9443
At 01:56 PM 5/15/2006, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Mon, 15 May 2006 13:14:41 EDT, Bill Nash said:
It works for spammers.
Certainly explains all the Turkish spam I get, what with me being just outside Ankara and all.
That's likely because they are attempting to do some sort of location analysis themselves and have limited data to work with. Spammers are generally not stupid. They are cheap since their ability o generate revenue is randomized based on the exploit of the day, so to speak. Targeting you with Turkish ads is probably a combination of being cheap and someone possibly stupid. Anyhow...before this thread turns into the debacle of incorrect information that the NTP one did -- Typically, an ip address is analyzed by using multiple sources of data. An attempt is made at a "triangulation" of sorts with both good and bad bits compared. As the good bits build the confidence factor in the triangulation rises. So you could have 2 pieces of info that do correlate, bring in the whois record, no correlation with that, and then toss it and bring something else in. Whois accuracy is not a factor here. Geo location isn't perfect, but it's not "bad". I've heard of accuracy levels as high as 90% and I don't think that's too far fetched. With HostIP reporting 50% on the user survey and them being what I can demonstrate as "bad", 90% isn't a stretch at all. Look at a geo use case. If there were a cyber threat level, a defcon so to speak, and the highest level is 5 and we reach this level someday, it could be prudent to build filter lists based on geo located routing table data and begin to block and log certain sources based on the threat level alone. Good geo data makes this entirely feasible. Applying this type of thinking to Internet doomsday scenarios will be key in survivability, IMHO. If you want every solution to be 100%, we're likely to be down for some factor longer than we need to be. Anyhow, back to your regularly scheduled show. :-) -M< -- Martin Hannigan (c) 617-388-2663 Renesys Corporation (w) 617-395-8574 Member of Technical Staff Network Operations hannigan@renesys.com
IP location services are a niche service, they won't work in the broad sense of things. Sites that need to make lawyers happy, such as MLB.com will work well with IP location services. MLB.Com basically says they won't broadcast Dodger home games in the LA area on their website. (Or any team in their home market) Obviously there are ways to hide your location, but as long as the services offers reasonable results there will be demand for these services. Remember most of these IP location services were originally founded for advertisting reasons, not anti-fraud. Kevin On 5/15/06, Brian Wallingford <brian@meganet.net> wrote:
I'm not quite comfortable with the idea of building a market audience based on data with at best dubious accuracy.
On Mon, 15 May 2006, Martin Hannigan wrote:
:At 12:49 PM 5/15/2006, Brian Wallingford wrote: : :><cough> scam_snake_oil_etc </cough> : : :How so?
AC> Date: Mon, 15 May 2006 09:35:47 -0700 AC> From: Ashe Canvar AC> Can any of you please recommend some IP-to-geo mapping database / web AC> service ? AC> AC> I would like to get resolution down to city if possible. Many people would. Don't hope for much better than country granularity -- and even _that_ frequently is incorrect. Try the ".zz.countries.nerd.dk" DNS zone for a quick-and-easy source. Disclosure: I'm not affiliated in any way, other than that I use it. Eddy -- Everquick Internet - http://www.everquick.net/ A division of Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - http://www.brotsman.com/ Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 785 865 5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 316 794 8922 Wichita ________________________________________________________________________ DO NOT send mail to the following addresses: davidc@brics.com -*- jfconmaapaq@intc.net -*- sam@everquick.net Sending mail to spambait addresses is a great way to get blocked. Ditto for broken OOO autoresponders and foolish AV software backscatter.
On 5/15/06, Ashe Canvar <acanvar@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
Can any of you please recommend some IP-to-geo mapping database / web service ?
I would like to get resolution down to city if possible.
The gold standard is MaxMind GeoIP. http://www.maxmind.com/ There are a couple "free" ones I've seen, but they are quite a bit less accurate. I can't think of them off the top of my head. As a major caveat, all geolocation services do have some degree of inaccuracy, because the sources of data are very diverse. (Some ISPs provide complete subnet maps to MaxMind and other providers, whereas some data is scraped from WHOIS or provided by inference from end-users.) -- -- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>
As a major caveat, all geolocation services do have some degree of inaccuracy, because the sources of data are very diverse. (Some ISPs provide complete subnet maps to MaxMind and other providers, whereas some data is scraped from WHOIS or provided by inference from end-users.)
And some organizations run their own internal networks across international borders. In other words, knowing that subnet X is allocated to company Y who has a 300 meg Internet connection in city Z, does not mean that all the users of that connection are also in city Z. They could be scattered around the world. This is why some companies use other sources of data to infer the location, i.e. if users of an IP address prefer yahoo.fr to yahoo.com, then that is one datapoint in favour of them being located in France. If you understand the principles of RBL weighting then you will get the idea. --Michael Dillon
Quova seems to be the premier service: http://www.quova.com/ I read a story on them some time ago and I was left with the impression that all the other players are rookies, but then again, you probably will pay heavily for this service. Geobytes is another one I've played with. We're a small ISP, and I know they've never asked for our ranges, so the best any of these could do would be on a multi-county basis. For kicks I would like to try an IP address from each of our subnets and see how they do. Frank -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Ashe Canvar Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 11:36 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Geo location to IP mapping Hi all, Can any of you please recommend some IP-to-geo mapping database / web service ? I would like to get resolution down to city if possible. Thanks and Regards, -ashe
Ashe Canvar <acanvar@gmail.com> wrote:
Can any of you please recommend some IP-to-geo mapping database / web service ?
It's mostly dead reckoning with a thick layer of marketing on top to make it look credible. The 90% solution is to take the freely-available GeoIP country database and use that. Beyond that, you're paying lots of money for information that has a finer granularity but is arguably no more accurate.
I would like to get resolution down to city if possible.
Good luck. -- She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong. - Mae West
PC> Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 11:17:10 +0000 (UTC) PC> From: Peter Corlett PC> Beyond that, you're paying lots of money for information that has a PC> finer granularity but is arguably no more accurate. It's precision versus accuracy -- one of the most basic concepts in the sciences and engineering. These GeoIP products are effectively saying "492.657135537618435926731948623556863864684714111678294652765 +/- 100". Eddy -- Everquick Internet - http://www.everquick.net/ A division of Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - http://www.brotsman.com/ Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 785 865 5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 316 794 8922 Wichita ________________________________________________________________________ DO NOT send mail to the following addresses: davidc@brics.com -*- jfconmaapaq@intc.net -*- sam@everquick.net Sending mail to spambait addresses is a great way to get blocked. Ditto for broken OOO autoresponders and foolish AV software backscatter.
participants (17)
-
abuse@cabal.org.uk
-
Alain Hebert
-
Ashe Canvar
-
Bill Nash
-
Bill Woodcock
-
Brian Wallingford
-
Edward B. DREGER
-
Frank Bulk
-
Gunther Stammwitz
-
Hank Nussbacher
-
Jeff Rosowski
-
Kevin Pawloski
-
Martin Hannigan
-
Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com
-
Roland Perry
-
Todd Vierling
-
Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu