Small release announcement for libloc 0.9.7

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Hi all,

yesterday, we released libloc 0.9.7, and I just thought I post a small release announcement here, in case you might be interested.

This version contains two noticeable improvements:

  1. Country results for Amazon AWS IP space are now more accurate.
    Previously, we returned “US” for most of these networks, since they fall under ARIN jurisdiction, which does not provide country information for sub-allocated networks. Thanks to an IP feed from Amazon itself, we can now provide more accurate data, mapping those networks to their AWS availability zones, which can then be traced back to certain countries.
    Other major cloud providers (Google, Microsoft, etc.) suffer from the same problem in theory, but they either do not provide more accurate data in a machine-readable format, or do not make them public.
    Please refer to bug #12594 for technical details if you are interested. :slight_smile:

  2. AS names are now available for ARIN region
    Unfortunately, the public feeds of ARIN and LACNIC lack some information, including names or descriptions of Autonomous Systems. We could only return an AS number (say 13335 for Cloudflare, for example), but did not have any string to show.
    ARIN provides a file with some technical AS names, which we now parse. Some of these names might be not very human-readable, but there do not seem to be more precise information available without signing some documents and mailing them to the USA.
    LACNIC remains uncovered at the time of writing; we only have ASNs and a roughly precise country for allocations by this RIR. Perhaps this might change in the future, but it looks like you need to snail mail something to Uruguay for getting access to a more precise version of their database, which comes with some legal hurdles, too. :expressionless:
    Please refer to this commit for technical details.

All IPFire machines will have received these improvements automatically by the next 7 days, as the location database is updated weekly by a cron job. No manual interaction is required.

The difference will look like this:

[root@maverick ~]# location version
Tue, 06 Jul 2021 05:33:24 GMT
[root@maverick ~]# location lookup 8.8.8.8
8.8.8.8:
  Network                 : 8.8.8.0/24
  Country                 : United States of America
  Autonomous System       : AS15169
  Anycast                 : yes
[root@maverick ~]# location lookup 34.250.76.230
34.250.76.230:
  Network                 : 34.248.0.0/13
  Country                 : United States of America
  Autonomous System       : AS16509

[root@maverick ~]# location version
Sat, 10 Jul 2021 05:56:12 GMT
[root@maverick ~]# location lookup 8.8.8.8
8.8.8.8:
  Network                 : 8.8.8.0/24
  Country                 : United States of America
  Autonomous System       : AS15169 - GOOGLE
  Anycast                 : yes
[root@maverick ~]# location lookup 34.250.76.230
34.250.76.230:
  Network                 : 34.248.0.0/13
  Country                 : Ireland
  Autonomous System       : AS16509 - AMAZON-02

Note “GOOGLE” and “AMAZON-02” after the ASN, and the country code for 34.248.0.0/13 changing from USA to Ireland, which is where these IP addresses are located.

As usual, information on how to retrieve and use libloc's source code are available here, should you want to use it outside of IPFire. Please report any inaccurate networks in this bug, and ask technical or development questions on the mailinglist, if necessary.

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller

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