[OpenIPMap] A long-overdue update on the status of openipmap

[Emile Aben]

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Hi Sebastian,

Thanks for suggestions, some quick comments inline.

> I think the RTT features are at this point the most helpfull
> because they improve the output accuracy. Other features such as
> visual representation are things others could change for their
> purpose. The RTT features can also be gradually build-in in terms
> of complexity.
> 
> If you do not take the first and last hop into account, then you
> are basically left with 'public' router locations. These cities are
> saved into the system, doing a count on them gives them a value
> that could be taken into account with the suggestions: "well known
> router locations / internet exchanges". If the lookup for a hop is
> not for the first/last one of the traceroute then the min-latency
> and the lat/long of the previous hop should give a radius where the
> current hop should be in.

Doing this hop-to-hop is tricky (variability adds up, and packets to
hop N, are far from guaranteed to traverse hop N-1 you see in the
traceroute, nor is the return path guaranteed to have the same
latency), but we can certainly do this as RTT from the source as you
suggest below.

> 
> Then check the known routerlocations and "popularity" for
> suggestions. If none are found, do the PTR name based suggestion.
> 
> This could be improved, if the certainty of the next hop is high,
> that radius could be used to limit the currents hop possible
> locations, but that is for later I think.
> 
> Also taking into account that traces of RIPE atlas have a known
> starting point and traces to a RIPE probe have a known end-point
> aswell. Not usefull for 3rd parties that use OpenIPmap but for the
> RIPE sources it will help improving the data.
> 
> When this is a public service, this could be abused or mis-used and
> polute the data. This is more a security issue, anonymous lookups
> might not be allowed to change router locations and registered
> users are logged to the system making it traceable. Maybe some sort
> of reputation system could also prevent a low reputation from
> overiding a location set by a (very) high reputation, option left
> is then to send a suggestion.

Anonymous updates are already not allowed. The version of OpenIPMap
running on marmot.ripe.net does authenticate against RIPE Access, so
we do only have logged in users, every insertion in the database has a
userID associated with it, so doing reputation-things would certainly
be possible if the situation called for that.

OpenIPMap is going to be a bit more exposed soon as RIPE Atlas
traceroute results are going to have an 'openipmap' tab.

cheers,
Emile
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