Live data from Hacker News

How to build a IP geolocation database from scratch?

ipapi.is

11–20 of 186 posts

Re: How to build a IP geolocation database from scratch?

#11
If you don't want to do this yourself, you can actually just get Cloudflare to do it for you for free using a simple Worker since all Cloudflare requests contain approximate IP location information.

You can also just send a request to my URL (Cloudflare Worker operated - so it should have global low latency): https://www.edenmaps.net/iplocation

Use it for small applications, I don't mind. Just don't start sending me 10M requests per day ;-)

Re: How to build a IP geolocation database from scratch?

#13
post #2

Step 1: Download Geolocation Database

Step 1: Download Geolocation Data Unless you think CSV is a database?

Maybe a dumb question (I have no knowledge), but why wouldn't we think of .CSV files as databases? It can have columns and rows filled with information and isn't that what makes a thing a database?

Re: How to build a IP geolocation database from scratch?

#14
post #2

Step 1: Download Geolocation Database

Step 1: Download Geolocation Data Unless you think CSV is a database?

Are we really going to do the mincing of words here? Did you need the word "dump" or "export" before you understood? Although I wasn't wild about the original poster's "step 1" terseness, it's silly to think a normal person wouldn't be able to parse the sentence well enough to understand "download the database contents - perhaps stored in CSV format".

Re: How to build a IP geolocation database from scratch?

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: Download Geolocation Data Unless you think CSV is a database?

Maybe a dumb question (I have no knowledge), but why wouldn't we think of .CSV files as databases? It can have columns and rows filled with information and isn't that what makes a thing a database?

Best I can guess here, the reply is considering relational databases as "real databases" and flat files.... not real.

Re: How to build a IP geolocation database from scratch?

#16
Interesting but this isn't actually how geolocation is done, right? The ARIN/RIPE data isn't sufficiently accurate to be useful beyond country. Commercial geolocation involves correlating client IP vs known physical location e.g. from WiFi AP or mailing a package to the user. At least that's what I have been told over the decades.

Re: How to build a IP geolocation database from scratch?

#19

Any suggestions for geolocating datacenter IPs, even very roughly? I'm analysing traceroute data, and while I have known start and end locations, it's the bit in the middle I'm interested in. I can infer certain details from airport codes in node hostnames, for example. It would also be possible - I guess - to infer locations based on average RTT times, presuming a given node's not having a bad day. Anyone have any o…

https://ensa.fi/papers/geolocation_imc17.pdf has some ideas.

Using RIPE atlas probes to get RTT to the IPs from known locations is close to your idea and probably the best anyway.

Post reply on HN