[101162] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Using RIR info to determine geographic location...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Hank Nussbacher)
Thu Dec 20 01:58:21 2007
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:48:44 +0200
To: Drew Weaver <drew.weaver@thenap.com>, "nanog@merit.edu" <nanog@merit.edu>
From: Hank Nussbacher <hank@efes.iucc.ac.il>
In-Reply-To: <B7152C470C9BF3448ED33F16A75D81C14D24ADD68A@exchanga.thenap
.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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
