If you have a newly allocated subnet, and if you have already BGP announced the subnet with your datacenter, but the IP whois still showing wrong GeoIP information, then you need to follow some steps:
Update Address Information on IP Registry
The very first thing, is you need to make sure that your IP registry shows the right geolocation information or not on their official whois.
You can check from the below whois (select once from where the IP subnet has been registered):
Create RADb Object Routes
Secondly, you need to ask your upstream provider/data center if they have successfully BGP announced your subnet on their network or not. Make sure that, your object route is visible on RADb.net with your ASN (if you have your own ASN) or your data center ASN (if you don’t have your own ASN). You need to do the route object before the BGP announcement because all major ISPs verify ROA and IRR during the BGP announcement and propagation.
You need to check on RADb.net whether your ASN / your data center ASN is showing there like this or not. If not, then you need to contact your IP registry to do the route object on your ASN / your data center ASN for you. You may also find multiple legacy route objects on RADb.net by the previous IP subnet holder, which are not in currently use, but still may affect your network performance by increasing latency and ping drop. In such cases, you can contact RADb team to remove such legacy route objects from their site.
Contact GeoIP Database Websites
The third step is vital if the above two steps are properly resolved by your end, then you need to contact major IP database sites in order to correct your subnet GeoIP information as soon as possible. Below are some major GeoIP database sites, where you can send your IP correction request.
- https://www.ip2location.com/contact/
- https://ipinfo.io/corrections
- https://ipgeolocation.io/contact.html
- https://db-ip.com/contact/
- https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-location-correction
- http://www.ipligence.com/contact/
- https://support.google.com/websearch/contact/ip/
- https://ipdata.co/corrections.html
- https://ip-api.com/docs/correction
Please note, these GeoIP database sites may take from one week to months to update the correct GeoIP information on their database based on your provided data and BGP information. If your provided GeoIP information does not match your BGP announcement, then they may reject/ignore your correction request. That’s why all of the 3 steps mentioned in this documentation are vital to get your IP subnet information corrected.
Create Geofeed Records on OpenGeoFeed
OpenGeoFeed.org is a open-source project to help IP subnet holders to update geoinformation on their end, and all major GeoIP databases regularly crawl this website database to correct their geolocation data. So, if you add your subnet geolocation information on their website, then major GeoIP database websites will crawl this data and correct their database.
Here, as you can see, we have added our IP subnets and manually added their country, region, city, and zip code on the OpenGeoFeed site dashboard.
Create Geofeed File and Publish with IP Registry
Apart from creating geofeed records on OpenGeoFeed.org, you should also create geofeed file on your website on the below location: https://www.yoursite.com/geofeed.csv
Information to add to that geofeed.csv file in this format (subnet, alpha 2-digit country code, region code, city name in normal text format, zipcode in normal text format):
103.172.92.0/24,IN,IN-MH,Mumbai,400070
103.180.163.0/24,IN,IN-MH,Mumbai,400070
166.0.129.0/24,IN,IN-MH,Mumbai,400070
2001:df7:6880::/47,IN,IN-MH,Mumbai,400070
2001:df7:6880::/48,IN,IN-MH,Mumbai,400070
You need to replace the above-shared information with your own subnet, and geolocation information. You can check your country code and region code from the ISO website.
Once the file is created and published on your website, ask your IP registry to publish the geofeed file on your IP subnets. Once published by IP registry, the whois information will look like this:
inetnum: 103.172.92.0/24
geofeed: https://example.com/geofeed.csv
Note: 103.172.92.0/24 is shown only for demonstration purposes, your subnet will look different. Now, the GeoIP database websites will directly crawl for geofeed.csv file for up-to-date geographic address information, but the GeoIP database sites may still verify your geofeed.csv file information along with the BGP announcement and their internal algorithms.
We strongly encourage you, to follow all of these methods mentioned above in order to correct your GeoIP information as quick as possible.
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