North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Using RIR info to determine geographic location...

  • From: Hank Nussbacher
  • Date: Thu Dec 20 01:59:31 2007

At 08:44 PM 19-12-07 -0500, Drew Weaver wrote:

I too would be interested to know how others feel about the various geo-location services available to speed things along. Three that come to mind are Akamai, Neustar/Ultradns and the "roll your own" Cisco GSS 4492R. How do they stack up? How good are the various Maxmind files?

Thanks,
Hank


Is this becoming a more common or less common practice as we slide ourselves into the last week of 2007? The reason I am wondering is we have noticed some 'issues' recently where correct info in the RIR causes very inefficient and sometimes annoying interaction with some of the world's largest online applications (such as Google) lets say for example that a customer in India purchases dedicated server or Co-Location hosting at a HSP in the United States [very common]. So the RIR shows that the customer is in India, so when the customer interacts with any google applications google automatically directs this traffic to google.in (or the India version of whichever app)....

More unfortunate than this fact, is the fact that it appears that services and application providers such as google are caching RIR data for an "unknown" amount of time. Which means that if a service provider SWIPs an allocation to a customer (lets use the same example... again in India) (say a /24) to a user, and then that user subsequently returns that allocation and the service provider re-allocates in smaller blocks to different customers in say /29, /28.. et cetera... the problems related to this issue are compounded (30 customers being affected, instead of one...) by this caching...

Obviously providing RIR information is the responsibility of service providers (it is even ARIN's policy) has anyone else in the community ran into issues such as this and found solutions or workarounds?

Happy holidays to all on NANOG :D

Thanks,
-Drew