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We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

blog.globalping.io

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Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#11

Post by vasco »

Havoc wrote: post #3

Bit surprised this works. Latency variability is huge and sometimes quite disconnected from geo location. I recall talking to someone in NL and realised I've got better latency to NL content from the UK than he did. Presumably better peering etc.

Wouldn't you just be closer to the closest PoP and requesting mostly cached content? With how connected amsterdam is they couldn't be around there. Also depending on when it was up until like 7-8 years ago even in major city centers there was no fiber in most places in NL. Now it's mostly covered.

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#12

Post by matt-p »

Havoc wrote: post #3

Bit surprised this works. Latency variability is huge and sometimes quite disconnected from geo location. I recall talking to someone in NL and realised I've got better latency to NL content from the UK than he did. Presumably better peering etc.

Could just be local loop latency, in VDSL or DOCSIS you can get 5-15ms of latency just in your first 1KM. London (e.g Telehouse) > Amsterdam is only about 7ms.

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#14

Post by xyst »

Tried with an IP allocated to a major wireless network operator. It was far off but also ran out of credits when trying with higher limits on subsequent attempts.

Seems tool is relying on ICMP results from various probes. So wouldn't this project become useless if target device disables ICMP?

I wonder if you can "fake" results by having your gateway/device respond with fake ICMP requests.

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#15

Post by westurner »

Wi-FI RTT is more accurate than trilateration with RSSI but requires hw support.

IEEE 802.11mc > Wi-Fi Round Trip Time (RTT) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11mc#Wi-Fi_Round_Trip...

/? fine time measurement FTM: https://www.google.com/search?q=fine+time+measurement+FTM

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#16

Post by jimaek »

xyst wrote: post #14

Tried with an IP allocated to a major wireless network operator. It was far off but also ran out of credits when trying with higher limits on subsequent attempts. Seems tool is relying on ICMP results from various probes. So wouldn't this project become useless if target device disables ICMP? I wonder if you can "fake" results by having your gateway/device respond with fake ICMP requests.

I talk about it a bit in the article. The easiest solution is to use the last available hop. In most cases its close enough to properly detect the country even if the target blocks ICMP.

Email me if you would like to get some additional credits to test it out, dakulovgr gmail.

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#17

Post by navigate8310 »

> Globalping is an open-source, community-powered project that allows users to self-host container-based probes. These probes then become part of our public network, which allows anyone to use them to run network testing tools such as ping and traceroute.

How's this different from RIPE ATLAS?

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#18

Post by Retr0id »

Retr0id wrote: post #6
greyface- wrote: post #4

How feasible would it be for the host under measurement to introduce additional artificial latency to ping responses, varying based on source IP, in order to spoof its measured location?

Not-impossible, but it would be a whole lot simpler to just not respond to pings in the first place.

But also, as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836803 , someone can still probe the second-last hop and get pretty close.

Re: We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency

#20

Post by kortex »

jimaek wrote: post #2

This is a little project exploring the feasibility of using a service such as Globalping for geo location needs. I had fun making it but please note that the current implementation is just a demo and far from a proper production tool. If you really want to use it then for best possible results you need at least 500 probes per phase. It could be optimized fairly easily but not without going over the anon user limit wh…

I wonder if you could optimize for reducing the total probe count (at the expense of possibly longer total time, though it may be faster in some cases) by using some sort of "gradient descent".

Start by doing the multi-continent probe, say 3x each. Drop the longest time probes, add probes near the shortest time, and probe once. Repeat this pattern of probe, assess, drop and add closer to the target.

You accumulate all data in your orchestrator, so in theory you don't need to deliberately issue multiple probes each round (except for the first) to get statistical power. I would expect this to "chase" the real location continuously instead of 5 discrete phases.

I just watched the Veritasium video on potentials and vector fields - the latency is a scalar potential field of sorts, and you could use it to derive a latency gradient.

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