Trippy – A Network Diagnostic Tool

Yes, in my experience GeoIp is _highly_ unreliable, alas Trippy can do no more than report the location from the provided mmdb file.

I'm aware of some interesting techniques which use timing measurements from multiple locations to try and triangulate a more accurate location. In fact somebody raised a request for supporting JA4L [0] to me just this morning.

[0] https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy/issues/856

Free geoip database is very so-so, at least for residential addresses. For example, my ISP is of Romanian ownership (Digi), and although I'm Spanish, located in Spain, and using a Spanish contract (not roaming at all) for years (not a recently arrived ISP), I'm still very frequently shown Romanian versions of ecommerce sites I visit from my phone or home connection.

But I wonder: shouldn't at least intermediate router/exchanges locations be better pinpointed through their who is information? Isn't that database updated?

I wonder how reliable is JA4L once you start adding hops in the middle of the trace, I guess it takes in account the timing of the intermediate points.

A little time ago (1 month? 2? I'm so bad with dates) somebody showed their IP location service that was built using a similar technique, but measuring from multiple different locations, and I think they had a free version of the database. I'll try to find it later.

I think I might've mixed a bunch of different stuff in my comment, but the provider I was talking about was IPInfo. They do distributed JA4L-like location guessing and have a free IP-to-country DB:

https://ipinfo.io/blog/verifying-ip-address-accuracy/

That looks great, seems like they've raised the bar for GeoIp accuracy, kudos to them.

It looks like they provide mmdb files (for a fee) which should be compatible with Trippy. I'd love to be able to test it out, the sample [0] they provide is rather limited but I guess enough to test compatibility.

[0] https://github.com/ipinfo/sample-database/blob/main/IP%20Geo...

You might also be interested in "geofeed" attributes in the WHOIS databases, in some database they can be found in a "remarks" field).

This record usually leads to an RFC 8805 formatted document that shows a mapping between IP address ranges and their (approximate) location. In RFC 9092, efforts were made to make this a more structural field.

Thank you, I'll look into those RFCs.

Reach out to them, they’re awesome folk and were willing to sponsor a 501(c)3 I worked on.

What a coincidence! I am the DevRel of IPinfo, and I was just about to reach out to you. My teammate (Shoutout to Max) has already mentioned your project on our team Slack, and I was thinking about a polite way to pitch our free IPinfo Country ASN dataset to your project. I will open a Github Issue right now.

Thanks! I’ll take a look