alt Hacker NewsWe have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency
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This is a little project exploring the feasibility of using a service such as Globalping for geo location needs.
I had fun making it but please note that the current implementation is just a demo and far from a proper production tool.
If you really want to use it then for best possible results you need at least 500 probes per phase.
It could be optimized fairly easily but not without going over the anon user limit which I tried to avoid
If I understood the post the author just takes the location of smallest ping as the winner. This seems like a very rudimentary approach. Why not do triangulation? If you take each ping time as a measurement of distance between two points, you should be able to ping from a random selection of IPs and from there calculate the location.
How feasible would it be for the host under measurement to introduce additional artificial latency to ping responses, varying based on source IP, in order to spoof its measured location?
Bit surprised this works. Latency variability is huge and sometimes quite disconnected from geo location. I recall talking to someone in NL and realised I've got better latency to NL content from the UK than he did. Presumably better peering etc.
Amazing idea and execution, the sort of stuff I wish there was more of on HN.
> Globalping is an open-source, community-powered project that allows users to self-host container-based probes. These probes then become part of our public network, which allows anyone to use them to run network testing tools such as ping and traceroute.
How's this different from RIPE ATLAS?
> Group and sort the results; the country with the lowest latency should be the correct one
Sometimes residential ISPs (that hosts the probe) may have a bad routing due to many factors, how does the algorithm take that into account?
Wi-FI RTT is more accurate than trilateration with RSSI but requires hw support.
IEEE 802.11mc > Wi-Fi Round Trip Time (RTT) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11mc#Wi-Fi_Round_Trip...
/? fine time measurement FTM: https://www.google.com/search?q=fine+time+measurement+FTM
Tried with an IP allocated to a major wireless network operator. It was far off but also ran out of credits when trying with higher limits on subsequent attempts.
Seems tool is relying on ICMP results from various probes. So wouldn't this project become useless if target device disables ICMP?
I wonder if you can "fake" results by having your gateway/device respond with fake ICMP requests.
Wow, it works !
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It'd be clever to integrate this into the TCP stack so it tells you immediately what the lowest bound is on the distance to the counterparty based on the time between data sent and the corresponding acknowledgements. I can see some immediate applications for that.