Hi Peter! Peter Koch wrote:
Wilfried,
particular end-system using a particualr address, at a particular point in time, from a block registered in a particular RIR's DB as an assignment is very bad idea to begin with.
At least for the RIPE-DB, there are no agreed or definend semantics for the interpretation of the country: attribute. The data is a hint, at best.
agreed, but the problem in question is not necessarily related to the RIPE DB being used as source of the geolocation information. What seems to be desirable is some notification of changes when a certain address block is unassigned or, more importantly, reassigned.
Well, we actually do have that mechanism in place: the registry database. It offers a granularity of (legacy, plus) allocations to LIRs and the assignments from within the PA blocks. In principle, this data should be reasonably accurate and should be maintained regularly. I presume at least the allocations, being maintained by the RIR should be pretty reliable?
From within the blocks, that's a different story maybe... But it should remain a scan and pull-technology by those who want to read and consume the data. I am not convinced that a notification service for everyone and her dog would be scalable?
This doesn't have to provide the new location information, but should initiate a new run of the location magic for this address range, so the GeoLoc provider knows when to update/refresh which information.
For some situations this could be a couple of times per hour, for mobile devices ;-) Other than that I'd suggest a frequency of once per day to pick up the new information.
Of course, we know similar demands from the domain business and these requests aren't all free of concern, but the situation might be different here in the addressing world.
Yep, I think the discussion is useful, at least to start to understand what the expectations, the reality and the boundary conditions are! I always get back to see that resource distribution for the IP-world, for the Internet was never taking (volatile) national boundaries into account, neither on the administrative nor on the operational level. Maybe the parties trying to use geo-location to control access to information and (licensed) services should also start to accept that fact for their business model?
-Peter
Wilfried.