In the first article on IP to location I described the overall concept. In this edition we'll look at the implementation and how to scale the tracing to a reasonable speed.

With the examples from the last article you can also implement everything to build your own database. Before you jump into it take a minute to look at the implications.

Taking the example from the previous article 217.80.0.0/12 for the German Telekom we have to trace 1mio addresses and scanning them all will take a while:

# time traceroute -w 1 -m 8 -q 1 217.80.0.1
traceroute to 217.80.0.1 (217.80.0.1), 8 hops max, 40 byte packets
 2  217.0.72.230  36.974 ms   
 3  ke-eb1.ke.de.net.dtag.de (62.154.98.82)  54.454 ms
 4  217.0.74.213  54.610 ms
 5  * * *
 6  * * *
 7  * * *
 8  * * *

real    0m3.244s

If we can make the make …

Several years ago (looking at archive.org it was at the end of 2001) I wrote a database that translated IPs to locations. Very similar to the city-db from maxmind.com. Perhaps someone still remembers the article in the iX about it ?

Anyway, now it is time to release the idea to the public. The idea is a distributed, open-source IP to location translation. Source comes later.

The basic idea

The idea behind IP-to-location translation is pretty old already. For I stumbled over it when I was running traceroute to some IP addresses on IRC. If you are in city-specific channels, you can easy proof if the basic idea works or not.

# traceroute -w 1 -q 1 …