The IP location isn't the location of the company is it?
According to Domain Tools, the IP location is the US, which obviously it isn't.

IP Location: United States Linode Llc

There is that, but there is another lurking danger: an outdated "bogon" list. You would hope that nobody is silly enough to use a static bogon list, but apparently my ISP, for one, is: their DNS servers are refusing connections from the Linode servers. Blocked DNS servers aren't a big problem (one can simply use other DNS servers), but if mail servers are using them too (and apparently some are), that's more troublesome.

Btw, if Linode has other (older) IP address space available to them, perhaps it would be a good idea to move the default DNS servers there to be safe?



But would it necessarily be a lie?

According to whois documentation found on the RIPE site, the "country" entry doesn't have a definitive meaning and could be the country "where the IP space is in use". I'm not certain that is where MaxMind et al is getting "US" from, but an OVH discussion that I found suggests that it may be.

There is also the RIPE "delegated" list (that currently shows "EU" for Linode's block) mentioned in the original post. That is used directly by at least 2 GeoIP scripts that I found.

Unfortunately, this makes the London datacentre unusable for me in hosting UK-focussed websites.

My understanding is that, everything else being equal, Google ranks UK-hosted sites higher in searches originating in the UK. With the London IP range appearing to be US-based, sites hosted there will be penalised.

I was really hoping to move some sites to Linode since the announcement of the UK datacentre, so hopefully this can be resolved..

I also understand that IP country should be country where servers are physically located. Yes, in theory others should not rely on IP country but often they do (and sometimes this driving me crazy because it is nearly impossible to persuade server on the other side that I am really me just "moved" by few thousands km).

I believe you can imagine what this may cause when connecting to we-provide-enhanced-user-experience-based-on-your-location-and-we-have-no-idea-why-your-connection-is-so-lazy.

afaik, google doesn't care about the IP address just the domain name (co.uk > com for uk searches).

Agreed. Linode's other datacentre IPs resolve to their physical location (ie. texas, atlanta, california, new york).

The IP address of my home connection resolves to the city I live in, not the headquarters of my ISP etc.



Google themselves say it does: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/W ... 84af&hl=en

Again, there's nothing we can do about this. There is nothing to be resolved except getting the GeoIP databases to fix their mistake, and we don't have much control over that.

This is an extremely new allocation to us. The /8 itself, 109/8, is a quite new allocation to RIPE from IANA -- new enough that we ran into a few poorly-managed networks early on that considered the IP addresses bogus because they were operating with months-old filtering. (This is an example of a very isolated incident -- one I've only seen a couple of instances of -- and just demonstrates what we orchestrate behind the scenes. Don't let this dissuade you from going to London, as you'll never notice.)

We've been in touch with MaxMind, and they have informed us that the change has been made and should be pushed out before the end of the year. If the geographic IP database that you use reports United States for an IP that starts with 109, be sure to inform them that they are incorrect and their detection mechanism is missing some helpful data.

You can see here that the IP addresses definitely report that they are announced from London (this isn't always correct either, but it is here):

18:29 jsmith@aenima% whois 109.74.192.4 | grep origin
origin:         AS15830
18:29 jsmith@aenima% whois AS15830
[SNIP]
aut-num:        AS15830
as-name:        TELECITY-LON
descr:          TELECITYGROUP UK
[SNIP]
role:           Telecity Admin-c
address:        Telecity Group PLC
address:        10th Floor
address:        6&7 Harbour Exchange Square
address:        London
address:        UK
address:        E14 9GE
[SNIP]

I'd like to see GeoIP databases that factor ASN data into their determination, honestly.



My understanding is that Google only does this if a searcher specifically requests only local results in the U.K., and does not take the originating searcher's country into account as a generality. The URL you linked to alludes to that, as well.

Give it time, we'll get this shaken out...

_________________
Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

Are RIPE refusing to make changes? If so, that is strange, as there are many IP blocks that have a "country" field not matching the organisation's location, but rather the server's location. 87.248.118.0 and 87.248.120.0 are examples of Yahoo doing it. It would seem a bit unfair if Linode aren't allowed the same.

OVH takes it even further, using "country" values that don't match the location of them or the servers. You will find all sorts of European countries in the 94.23/16 block. For example, 94.23.113.0 = Poland, 94.23.113.16 = Spain, 94.23.113.64 = Germany, etc... while OVH and the servers are in France.



Can you please expand on the sort of issues that you have run into? Does it go beyond DNS servers refusing connections?

Thanks.

We've seen a couple of very small networks consider 109/8 to be a bogon, and summarily drop the traffic. Not for long, however -- we take care of it as soon as we notice.

_________________
Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

My linode is in this network and is listed at www.apews.org and www.cymru.com.

www.apews.org:

Entry matching your Query: E-180006
109.0.0.0/8CASE: C-131
Unallocated, dynamic or generically named IP spaceSpecial Reason:
No traffic until allocated

Anything we can do?

APEWS does not accept removal requests, per their FAQ, and consider such trivialities annoying. I would advise your recipient to stop using APEWS... any dnsbl with out-of-date information with a stated policy of not accepting corrections ought to be avoided.

Per http://www.revip.info/, it looks like that's about it; Team Cymru does not list the 109/8 space, although some two-bit dnsbl at http://www.moensted.dk/spam/no-more-funn/ appears to, with a link to Cymru:

IP not supposed to be routed. See http://www.cymru.com/Documents/bogon-list.html Bogon List v2.0 08 APR 2003 Rob Thomas bogon list 2.0 1055973600 (Thu Jun 19 00:00:00 2003)
This IP is not supposed to be not supposed to be routed, and is probaly not your public ip. It can't be removed!

2003 was a long time ago. I'd say that one's been abandoned.

I suppose you can add a second Linode in Newark just to relay mail to these borken destinations, then invoice the recipient's mail administrator (via postal mail) $20 to cover it. That might get the message across

Ouch

Have you had success in getting the network admins to update their bogon filtering, or is it a struggle?

The one or two networks I've seen approached have been extremely helpful. The Internet is actually run by skilled admins who just need a bump, for the most part.

I'll ask a couple resources I have about this, but as another poster suggested APEWS does not like being approached directly. Thanks for the heads-up.

_________________
Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

I was about to move my UK based websites over to a Linode, but I have the same concerns. My current provider reports a geo location of GB, United Kingdom (from http://cqcounter.com/whois/) whereas the IP of london1.linode.com reports the US. I believe the great Google does take into account the location of the IP address for ranking in the different googles (.com and .co.uk)

Any idea if this is possible to fix?

Thanks

Why does everyone have such little faith in Google's ability to do decent geolocation?