[188673] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joel Maslak)
Mon Apr 11 23:14:38 2016
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <6D9A23C7-77F6-4204-9338-20E9C51BABA5@delong.com>
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2016 21:14:32 -0600
From: Joel Maslak <jmaslak@antelope.net>
To: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
> So really, what is needed is two additional fields for the lat/lon of
> laterr/lonerr so that, for example, instead of just 38.0/-97.0, you would
> get 38.0=C2=B12/-97.0=C2=B110 or something like that.
>
It does seem needed to the geo location companies too, at least several of
them provide this - and it's been this way for a long time.
I didn't remember if Maxmind does or not, so I just checked. From some of
their documentation, the field "accuracy_radius" is returned which is "The
radius in kilometers around the specified location where the IP address is
likely to be." See
http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/web-services/#location . I don't think
it's in their free stuff (you get what you pay for, it seems).
It doesn't show up on their web interface to "try" the service nor does it
give a warning that these things can be wrong, but IMHO probably wouldn't
be a bad idea to say "Don't go show up at this address - it might not be
right!"
