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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

#31

Post by tomtomtom777 »

jimaek wrote: post #25
VladVladikoff wrote: post #22

If I understood the post the author just takes the location of smallest ping as the winner. This seems like a very rudimentary approach. Why not do triangulation? If you take each ping time as a measurement of distance between two points, you should be able to ping from a random selection of IPs and from there calculate the location.

I talk a little about it in the article, but the main goal was to build something simple that works as proof of concept. This brute force approach works much better than I expected as long as you have enough probes and a bit of luck. But of course there are much better and smarter approaches to this, no doubt!

How did you know how well these results work?

You mention the quality several times in the article but it's not clear how this is verified. Do you have a set of known-location-ip-addresses around the world (apart from your home)? Or are we just assuming that latency is a good indicator?

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

#32

Post by jimaek »

tomtomtom777 wrote: post #31
jimaek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talk a little about it in the article, but the main goal was to build something simple that works as proof of concept. This brute force approach works much better than I expected as long as you have enough probes and a bit of luck. But of course there are much better and smarter approaches to this, no doubt!

How did you know how well these results work? You mention the quality several times in the article but it's not clear how this is verified. Do you have a set of known-location-ip-addresses around the world (apart from your home)? Or are we just assuming that latency is a good indicator?

I run about 270 servers in verified locations as part of the Globalping network https://globalping.io/users/jimaek so I had plenty of targets to test

I tested against them, as well as other infrastructure I control that is not part of the network, and compared to the ipinfo results as well

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

#34

Post by TZubiri »

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…

isn't 3 theoretically enough?

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

#35

Post by TZubiri »

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?

>varying based on source IP,

Aha, that's what you would think, but what if I fake the source of the IP used to do the geolocation ping instead!

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

#36

Post by jofla_net »

direwolf20 wrote: post #24
VladVladikoff wrote: post #22

If I understood the post the author just takes the location of smallest ping as the winner. This seems like a very rudimentary approach. Why not do triangulation? If you take each ping time as a measurement of distance between two points, you should be able to ping from a random selection of IPs and from there calculate the location.

Packets don't travel in straight lines.

yeah, when i used to live in New England, and had more time to be interested in transit, i always was peaked in how comcast would route. No matter how far south i seemed to get, i'd always need to travel to Boston's peering point first to make it to NYC, even in New Haven. If you then simply switch isps, even at same address, verizon would send you south immediately.

so theres funky overlap wherein on one isp you appear closer to city A, and on isp 2 closer to city B, but its same physical address.

Continental classification I'd think would be good as they appear to be coalesced endpoints, separated by vast oceans.

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

#37

Post by NedF »

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…

[dead]

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

#38

Post by vitus »

altairprime wrote: post #9
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?

Courtesy of Xfinity and Charter overprovisioning most neighborhood’s circuits, we already have that today for a significant subset of U.S. Internet users due to the resulting Bufferbloat (up to 2500ms on a 1000/30 connection!)

You probably meant to say oversubscribing, not overprovisioning.

Oversubscription is expected to a certain degree (this is fundamentally the same concept as "statistical multiplexing"). But even oversubscription in itself is not guaranteed to result in bufferbloat -- appropriate traffic shaping (especially to "encourage" congestion control algorithms to back off sooner) can mitigate a lot of those issues. And, it can be hard to differentiate between bufferbloat at the last mile vs within the ISP's backbone.

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

#39

Post by jacquesm »

It'd be clever to integrate this into the TCP stack so it tells you immediately what the lowest bound is on the distance to the counterparty based on the time between data sent and the corresponding acknowledgements. I can see some immediate applications for that.
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