Clarifying some "countries" in location groups

[pmueller (Peter Müller)]

Hi,

first: Welcome to the IPFire community.

@anon95929906

Europe (EU): Does this represent all of the European Union, the European continent, or a miscellaneous type that only includes other European IPs not assigned to specific countries? The Wikipedia article on the standards mentions EU as being reserved, but doesn’t go into detail.

I know this answer is not really satisfying, but we do not know that. Networks are being flagged as “EU” because that country code appears in their RIR data, and we have absolutely no idea why the owner of that networks decided to put in this.

For most networks classified as “EU” I have seen so far, they were located somewhere in the European Union but could not be nailed down to a specific country. This happens, for example, for IP ranges of larger backbone providers.

Actually, the problem is worse as there is no exact definition about those country codes: Do they represent the physical location of a network or it’s jurisdiction?

This question was never clarified, which is why we cannot answer it either. In some cases, the jurisdiction matters, in some other scenarios, you care about the physical location. However, you will never know which is which, no matter which location database you are going to use.

@anon95929906

France, metropolitan (FX): According to ISO 3166-3, this code has been deprecated and merged into France proper. In the location database, do France and France, metropolitan overlap? Why is this code being used?

Hm, at the moment, we are not aware of any networks with this country code, so it’s effectively a stub:

location=# SELECT * FROM networks WHERE country = 'FX';
 network | country 
---------+---------
(0 rows)

My expectation is that all networks located there have been subsequently merged into “FR”.

@anon95929906

More generally, do some of these country codes represent a superset of several others, or are all of the country codes mutually exclusive?

They are exclusive.

@anon95929906

I realize that the data for the location database originates elsewhere, and that probably has something to with the country classifications being used in IPFire.

Yes, we are processing publicly available data from the five RIRs (AFRINIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, RIPE) and use custom override files to override locations for certain networks - for example, if the network owner tampers with those data - or flag them as being an anonymous proxy, a satellite network, or being used for anycast services.

Those override files can be accessed here.

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller