On 2002-01-09 15:21:18 +0000, Andrew Hilborne wrote: > Jose Nazario <joseat_private> writes: > > > On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, Ganu Skop wrote: > > > > > does anyone know if there's any tools that would be able to > > > generate world mapping by keyin ip say that my location is > > > thailand. the ip x.x.x.x is from singapore. then when i keyin > > > that particular ip (x.x.x.x ) it will generate a line from > > > singapore to thailand over the world map > > > > several tools can do this. Xtraceroute, in UNIX/X, can do this, for > > example. > > BUT, none of them can do it well, because this information just isn't > available for IP addresses. For example, a large block of addresses > may be allocated to UUNET, with appropriate addresses in the US, but > they may well be used all over the world. The registered snail-mail > addresses are virtually the only information such a tool can use. I work at the RIPE NCC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) that allocates IP addresses in Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa. Before that I worked at ARIN, the RIR that allocates IP addresses in North America, South America, and sub-Saharan Africa. We receive a large number of requests from people asking us how to use our database to map IP addresses to physical location. Here's the e-mail that we send to such users (written by me, so take with the apprpriate grain of salt). --- We discourage the use of IP to country mapping in general. There are several reasons why IP to country mapping is a bad idea. The main problem is that IP is designed to abstract the physical topology from the logical topology. What this means is that IP is *intended* to prevent you from knowing where a given computer is! Because the Internet is global, it is easy for users to either intentionally or unintentionally use IP addresses that have been assigned to a company conducting business in another region. For example, a user in Israel may be receiving ISP service from company who gets a link to Japan via a satellite company run out of the US. Which company has the space registered depends on their business and networking arrangements. Additionally, a user can circumvent this process easily either by using a HTTP proxy located anywhere in the world, or simply by using a Unix account anywhere in the world. In our experience, there are 3 main reasons why people want to perform this mapping: 1. Legal Protection 2. Marketing and/or Targeted User Interface 3. Curiosity Legal protection is understood here by a situation when companies attempt to prevent specific groups from seeing their content, eg. restricting access to encryption software. We recommend using country/language settings in browsers to select correct localization options, rather than bogus IP mapping. This should handle marketing and UI needs. For curiosity, well, go ahead, look at the inetnum file on our FTP site: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/split/ripe.db.inetnum.gz But don't expect accuracy!!! -- Shane Carpe Diem --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: loganalysis-unsubscribeat_private For additional commands, e-mail: loganalysis-helpat_private
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