Stephen Turner ([EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sunday, February 02, 2003 1:44 AM): > Actually, let me kick the discussion off now. As far as I can tell, > there are some free databases which mostly use "whois" lookups and > the like, so their accuracy on country-level lookups is at best 90% > (which is pretty poor, actually); and there are some commercial > databases which claim to do better at the country level, and also > attempt state and city level resolution, but they cost hundreds or > thousands of dollars.
> Do people who know about this subject think this is an accurate > characterisation? What (type of, or specific) solution or solutions would > people like to see in analog? I remember a couple years ago there was an effort to build a GeoIP database entirely from user input -- not using ARIN, NIC or whatever. I have spent the last couple weeks looking for this and can't find it anymore, so I guess the project never achieved fruition. It seems that would be a better solution than the current approach. On the other hand, this would not always be correct. For example, in Arizona, our telephone company, Qwest, provides broadband service using a bank of 3 class C ranges for the Phoenix metropolitan area. It uses some of these same IP numbers for broadband clients in other parts of the state: Flagstaff (a small city, 2 hours north and adamantly distinct from Phoenix) customers' IP numbers select from this bank. Now admittedly, that's probably no more than 2% of the Qwest broadband clients, but it means even user-reported information could be wrong. If a human-built solution were considered valuable, I think the Analog community has enough (and enough knowledgeable) users that we could make significant headway on it. Of course a human-compiled database is also liable to human error. :-) Another approach (has this been mentioned here already?) that could quickly build the database -- perhaps more accurately than NIC records -- would be to recognize patterns in host names. e.g my current IP translates with DNS to ip68-99-214-156.ph.ph.cox.net. Some basic recognition could determine that hostnames like *.ph.ph.cox.net are Phoenix, Arizona, USA. -- Jeremy Wadsack Wadsack-Allen Digital Group +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list: | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/unsubscribe.html | | Digest version: http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help-digest/ | Usenet version: news://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.analog.general | List archives: http://www.analog.cx/docs/mailing.html#listarchives +------------------------------------------------------------------------
