Re: [PATCH] Add GeoIP location to nameservers

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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Hi,

On Sun, 2016-01-10 at 17:25 +0100, IT Superhack wrote:
> Hello Michael, hello Matthias,
> 
> Michael Tremer:
> > Just out of curiosity, why do you find this information so helpful?
> 
> As Matthias said already, is is more a "nice to have" than something
> which is seriously needed.

This is not too much of an argument. My argument against this is that
it brings down page load times because of a not too useful information.

> I wrote this patch because a friend of mine in France discovered that
> his ISP assigns DNS servers from Australia and Great Britain, which
> was slowing down DNS resolving a lot.

I get that and this is actually a pretty good one.

That only leaves resolvers like 8.8.8.8 which will show "US" but
actually are located at many places around the world. Let's hope that
people don't get the wrong thing from the flag - or actually start
changing their DNS servers to something else :)

> Therefore I thougt it might be useful to see in which countries your
> DNS servers are located, just in case you didn't set some by your
> own.

It is sometimes. Although geographic location doesn't mean that it is
close on the network.

A system in GB is probably not an issue. Australia actually is a bit
far away.

> In general, adding geographic information to IP addresses is very
> helpful in my point of view because anomalies can be detected much
> better and more precise firewall rules are possible.

I don't get why.

> However, some thing might still be improved: For example, the
> ipinfo.cgi
> file shows the IP address, the rDNS name, whois information, but not
> the appropriate flag. So, if someone scrolls through the connection
> tracking
> page, he/she/it sees the source and destination IPs of any active
> (and
> recently closed) connection. At the moment, there is no way of
> telling
> which country an IP belongs to - without using additional web
> services, of
> course - since the flag is shown neither at the connection tracking
> page
> nor at the ipinfo.cgi page. This isn't very helpful, is it?

The ipinfo.cgi page shows the whois information for an IP address. That
may contain the name and HQ location of a company this IP address
belongs to, but that does *not* mean that the host is actually located
in that country - and almost certainly not at that address.

The GeoIP database is a completely different thing.

Judging by the location of the host does make any sense if you care
about security.

> 
> That is basically the motivation behind the two patches I submitted
> recently.
> 
> Best regards,
> Timmothy Wilson
> 

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