[ncc-services-wg] IP geolocation services

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 09:29:30AM +0100, Marco Hogewoning wrote:

> Address blocks are quarantined for a while when they are returned, so  
> I guess that anybody who regularly checks the database should notice  
> they went missing and this could be a nice hint that those addresses  
> aren't in use anymore and any data associated with it should be removed.

would that affect intra LIR assignment changes or just returns to the RIR?

> Or are you proposing more of a push system in which the RIR tries to  
> find and notify those people who collect these data to notify them  
> there have been changes.

I'd not say that the RIR should actively approach every GeoLoc provider
but the RIR, or the RIPE community, to pick on the difference, could try
to engage into dialogue, which I believe has been started already.
This is not to end up with the location information in the RIPE DB
which is unlikely to happen due to both technical (granularity)
and business ("our heuristics'r'us") limitations(*).  But getting the words
out how address-to-user-bindings change might be a worthwhile goal.
If possible, this would be an interesting presentation+discussion at
an EOF plenary.

> I can think of option 1 happening, in fact that mechanism is there,  
> option 2 (push) is almost impossible to achieve and I don't like  
> option 3 at all.

Well, yes, share your concerns re:the "off" button.

-Peter

(*) There are services that use the RIR DBs, though. See for example
    the perl IP::Country module, which is quite useful.  It's not so
    much that _all_ uses of DB data were bad, but the application
    needs to carefully select and understand the GeoLoc service's
    properties.  An update once a year is OK if you just want to
    map log file excerpts to some map.