Re: Geofeeds are good — was Re: Publishing BGP communties for your network (Re: What's up with BGP communities?)

[Jon Lewis via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2026, Mike via NANOG wrote:

> Using your own measurement is fine but where it gets a push back from 
> some of us, is your statement that geofeed data is treated as tier 2. 
> I for one publish geofeeds in an automated fashion.  I would like this 
> data to not be considered a red-headed stepchild.

"Some people might lie in their geofeeds" seems to have poisoned their 
view of geofeed reliability.  I really suspect the "geofeed fraud" is a 
small minority.  Other than low end VPN providers hoping to fool streaming 
content providers, I don't know why anyone would lie in their geofeed.

Ours is automated too.  We use an IPAM that allows us to tag every subnet 
with a "location", and each location has a full street address.  The 
coworker who setup our geofeed wrote a script that pulls all the allocated 
subnets and their locations from IPAM and builds the geofeed.  As long as 
we don't screw up in IPAM (which happens), the geofeed is automatic and 
correct.  I did end up having to write a geofeed auditor that catches when 
someone screws up and emails us so the improperly formatted (and 
improperly parsed) locations get fixed almost immediately.

The headaches of IP Geo providers "getting it wrong" impacting our 
customers is good motivation for making sure we publish accurate data.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis, MCP :)              |  I route
 Blue Stream Fiber, Sr. Neteng  |  therefore you are
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
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