Bug 12477

Summary: New Location Database incorrect for Isle of Man addresses
Product: Location Database Reporter: Bug Mann <opensysman>
Component: DatabaseAssignee: Peter Müller <peter.mueller>
Status: CLOSED CANTFIX QA Contact: Michael Tremer <michael.tremer>
Severity: Major Usability    
Priority: - Unknown -    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: all   
OS: All   
See Also: https://bugzilla.ipfire.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12458

Description Bug Mann 2020-09-04 10:30:18 UTC
As discussed in:
https://community.ipfire.org/t/core-update-level-148-location-filter/2932/11

All Isle of Man IP addresses are being classed as GB, not IM.
This has meant I have had to open firewall rules to a huge address range for incoming firewall connections. I am sure you would not be happy to have to change all your DE rules to accept EU instead.

I have looked in the IM list of addresses in this database, and they currently seem to be correct:
https://lite.ip2location.com/isle-of-man-ip-address-ranges

Thanks
Comment 1 Michael Tremer 2020-09-04 10:37:17 UTC
(In reply to Bug Mann from comment #0)
> All Isle of Man IP addresses are being classed as GB, not IM.

All does not seem to be true: https://location.ipfire.org/lookup/5.62.82.0

This is the first address from the list you linked and it is correctly put on the Isle of Man. For some reason OpenStreetMap thinks that IM is India.

It would help us to list the subnets that you found as not being correctly classified.

> This has meant I have had to open firewall rules to a huge address range for
> incoming firewall connections. I am sure you would not be happy to have to
> change all your DE rules to accept EU instead.

We get the data from the RIRs. That means that the ISPS declare where they use their address space. If they call it "GB" we simply copy that. We do not make any political decisions here whatsoever.
Comment 2 Bug Mann 2020-09-04 11:17:42 UTC
Here are ranges currently being used by my IM firewalls:

37.18.136.0 - 37.18.143.255
43.225.112.0 - 43.225.115.255
62.68.188.0 - 62.68.191.255
87.254.64.0 - 87.254.95.255
109.70.40.0 - 109.70.47.255
178.16.0.0 - 178.16.15.255
185.48.76.0 - 198.48.79.255
213.137.0.0 - 213.137.31.255
217.28.0.0 - 217.28.15.255

Thanks.
Comment 3 Peter Müller 2020-10-30 11:02:38 UTC
The following prefixes will be correctly flagged as being located in or related to IM as soon as we have released the more accurate location databases (which caused trouble on some machines running Core Update 150) again:
- 37.18.136.0/21
- 62.68.160.0/19 (sub-allocations are flagged as Jersey or Guernsey, we will leave that network untouched)

The country for those ranges is GB in the RIPE database indeed, and if we can make sure those are solely routed to IM, we will add overrides to correct their results:
- 43.225.112.0/22
- 87.254.64.0/19
- 109.70.40.0/21
- 178.16.0.0/20
- 213.137.0.0/19
- 217.28.0.0/20

At the time of writing, these prefixes are already correctly flagged:
- 185.48.76.0/22
Comment 4 Peter Müller 2020-10-30 11:10:58 UTC
(In reply to Peter Müller from comment #3)
> The country for those ranges is GB in the RIPE database indeed, and if we
> can make sure those are solely routed to IM, we will add overrides to
> correct their results:
> - 43.225.112.0/22
> - 87.254.64.0/19
> - 109.70.40.0/21
> - 178.16.0.0/20
> - 213.137.0.0/19
> - 217.28.0.0/20

Those networks are all operated by a company named "Manx Telecom Trading Ltd." residing on the Isle of Man. As stated above, this company has decided to set the country code for those networks GB for unknown reasons.

They seem to trace back to some location in the Great Britain area, but I have no evidence that any of those networks is solely used on the Isle of Man in technical terms. In fact, it rather looks like this company is registered there for administrative reasons (let's put it that way ;-) ), while their network infrastructure seems to be spread across GB.

I cannot tell why those networks are flagged as IM in other location databases. It seems as they try to locate the contact address given (we have observed similar cases before), which may completely differ from the networks' physical location.

Unfortunately, there is little we can do about them. GB seems to be a reasonable location for those networks, unless "Manx Telecom Trading Ltd." decides to change that value.