IPv6 Geolocation per /64

[Michael De Roover]

Hi all,

> It may be inside DNS, or it may be elsewhere, I do not know. There
> is a DNS "LOC" record, but that doesn't seem to be used anymore. It
> seems to be something else. But what, and where?
I find it a shame that this record is no longer in use. GeoIP is anything but 
accurate, and GPS data is not reasonable to request from servers. Not like you 
can just hook up a GPS receiver to a VPS. Even from individual users, it 
remains contentious, for privacy reasons. LOC is certainly a niche record, but 
it could be useful for servers at least, and maybe individual Internet users 
in IPv6 (for which I'm not qualified to comment).

Not to mention that this could offer more accurate location information about 
individual services behind reverse proxy! This brings me into DNSOP territory 
and a terrible proposal in the making. But what if that record had longitude / 
latitude records? Maybe a city that can either be derived or expressed 
directly? What if expected latency on the network could be expressed here, 
alongside two coordinates between public IP and actual responder, based on the 
operator's knowledge? That would be far richer than anything these 
contemporary heuristics can provide.

> At least for my IP the geo information I get from there is simply junk.
Same here, Germany is not my country of residence. I intentionally obfuscate 
it because I do not want the Internet to know where I live. I am also pretty 
sick of the "such and so wants to know your location" browser pop-ups. 
Granted, with GPS backing, that could actually offer a decent fallback to 
actual location even with that IP obfuscation.

> There's also a freely available service and API at https://ip-api.com you
> may find useful.
Personally I use iplist.cc and ipinfo.io for that (depending on preference and 
what I wrote when / use at the time). Granted, they do ultimately all rely on 
databases like MaxMind's... At least to the best of my knowledge. The main 
question with these front-ends to me is how useful their API is. ipinfo.io has 
been good for a long time, but their commercialization efforts made me look 
elsewhere. That's how iplist.cc came to be in this guy's operations.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet,
Michael De Roover

Mail: isc at nixmagic.com
Web: michael.de.roover.eu.org