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IP->Country Data (RE: ISP's Contact List)

  • From: william(at)elan.net
  • Date: Mon Jun 13 13:41:19 2005 
On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Daniel Senie wrote:
had wrong info or no info.

If you're the ISP, then your answer to your customers is "the web site you are going to is using an unreliable method to attempt to determine locality from IP address."

Then point them at the web site's contact form and suggest they complain to the web site owner.

As you've already noted, ARIN got the info correct. I suspect there are multiple vendors attempting to provide IP address to GPS address services. I doubt any of them will be 100% reliable, but clearly there is an interest in such services.
FYI - It maybe of interest here to know that completewhois provides this data. For determining ip->country placement only RIR data on direct ip allocations and assignments is used, so if ip block is listed as having
been allocated to company with corporate address in Jamaica but is used in
US, the block will show up as JM. That also avoids issue of having others
blame me for bad data as algorithm for how its generated is easily confirmed
with RIR whois and in 98% this does provide sufficiently good data. Our
lists are regenerated EVERY DAY and available at:
http://www.completewhois.com/statistics/data/ips-bycountry/rirstats/

Even though I've never promoted this, it actually is getting rather used
and I've had at least dozen requests this year along to make data available though means other then raw text file. So you might as well be first to know that 3 days ago this was finished and data is now available for verification by dns. You can now do lookup in RBL style to
<reverse-ip>.country-rirdata.dnsiplists.completewhois.com

(i.e. for my 216.151.192.1 dns server ip, it would be lookup at
1.192.151.216.coutry-rirdata.dnsiplists.completewhois.com)

For TXT lookups it will tell you country code and country name, i.e.
"US - United States". For RBL "A" lookups it will answer with 127.0.a.b
where a and b are ascii representation of 1st and 2nd letter of country code, so for example for US this would be 127.0.85.89

Complete list of these codes and instructions are at:
http://www.completewhois.com/statistics/data/ips-bycountry/rirstats/README

So feel free to use if you like for whatever reasons (and don't complain to me if you see wrong data, lookup RIR whois and send corrections there).

One last point is as I noted data is based on RIR direct allocations, so swips and suballocations are not used. In the future planned is separate service and data for experimental use that will be based on SWIP data (lowest allocation), however my checks on it show that in too many places its even less accurate then RIR direct info.

--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
[email protected]