IP Address / Block Locations not clear

May 5, 2015 3.7k views
Deployment Getting Started
david1153206
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david1153206

Hi, I span up a droplet in the Frankfurt, London centres. Can you tell me why the IP block does not seem to resolve to the expected country? The info I'm getting is that they are "routed" global IP blocks originating elsewhere. This seems to be a question that has been around for a while and has implications for mail servers and neighbourhood signals with respect to reputation of sites etc.

I like the platform, but the IP address is something that needs clarity.

robtex route analysis

Thanks

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3 Answers
rascul May 5, 2015

GeoIP is not reliable to map to the physical location. If something relies on GeoIP in such a manner, I would file a bug report because it's obviously broken.

https://xkcd.com/713/

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  • david1153206 May 5, 2015

    I don't know why you say it is obviously broken, when it is obviously not broken for many I the IP's I've tested on this service and others.

    I didn't find your remark about filing a bug report helpful, in fact it's a bit facetious given that this issue of IP address location seems very pertinent for the blocks used by these droplets and is not the first time it has been raised.

  • rascul May 5, 2015

    There's absolutely nothing about IP that makes it remotely possible to assume that an IP would be allocated to a physical location for any extent of time. GeoIP is a third party mechanism with databases that have no outside requirement to be updated or maintained. There's several different GeoIP databases, and are updated mostly from data mining, voluntary updates from ISPs, and guessing. Relying on that to be accurate is a bug.

david1153206 May 5, 2015
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david1153206 May 5, 2015

Accurate IP location is used in a wide range of security filters at enterprise level, and is used for CDN delivery across vast swathes of the internet, not to mention spam filters. Your response is noncommittal and not backed up by anything of real substance.

These throw away remarks don't address the original question.

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