[Gllug] geolocation

[James Courtier-Dutton]

On 16 July 2011 08:16, Alex Smith <alex at alexsmith.org> wrote:
> On 15 Jul 2011, at 20:28, James Courtier-Dutton <james.dutton at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> On 15 July 2011 19:21, Alain Williams <addw at phcomp.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 07:17:55PM +0100, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have being trying to track down a network performance problem.
>
> I can ping some sites on the internet with a low ping time, and some
>
> with higher ping times.
>
> Is there a command line tool in Linux that I can put an IP address
>
> into and it returns the location it.
>
> For example, ping www.google.com is quick, but ping www.facebook.com is
> slow.
>
>        host www.facebook.com
>
>        curl http://freegeoip.appspot.com/xml/69.171.228.11
>
>
> Thank you.
> So, that proves that facebook does not have any UK servers.
>
> Not quite, it proves that the servers you checked were accessible via IPs
> which were registered at some point to a country which is not the UK.
> As an aside, I like 'geoiplookup', available in Debian repos.

Well I have tracked down my performance problem.
I use sky broadband and its DNS service appears to ignore the first
DNS request most of the time, resulting in DNS lookup/response times
of 1 second or more. Although the sky broadband router is supposed to
be a DNS cache, it is hopeless.
I moved DHCP and BIND9 from the sky broadband router to a Linux box so
that my laptop picks up my Linux box as the DNS server via DHCP.
The BIND9 is just in cache mode, but once the first DNS lookup has
been read by the BIND9 cache, all the rest of my web surfing is now a
lot faster.
Conclusion, the sky broadband router is rubbish. (the non-netgear one)

On another point, some time ago I discovered a vulnerability in sky
broadband infrastructure that would allow me to switch off their
entire system if I wished and also spy on other peoples traffic. I
never reported it to them, because the only method to report it was
via an expensive premium support number. I did mention it on this list
about 1 year ago.
They appear to have fixed the vulnerability now so someone else must
have reported it to them.
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