North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

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

  • From: william(at)elan.net
  • Date: Mon Jun 13 14:57:14 2005

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Jim McBurnett wrote:

I'm sure that this made it here before but:

www.analysespider.com/ip2country/ip_country.html
Commercial service when there are several free ones available....

BTW - based on what I can see they are not updating data once per day but only once/month. Also having some experience in this matter I highly doubt that its much more accurate then what I got - it appears no matter what path you take to get the data, it would to a degree be wrong (difference
being which part is wrong). One possible way to resolve some issues could
be to have testing servers placed in several locations and analyze TTL for connections to various ips to determine how far its from several servers -
of course it would also not be accurate as ip networks are not necessarily interconnecting in the same region (CAIDA did their best with this method
some time ago but have not kept updated data as far as I know).

-----Original Message-----
From: william(at)elan.net [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 1:40 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: IP->Country Data (RE: ISP's Contact List)



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/READ
ME

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]