Our Plan to Update Country Codes
• 6 min read
At the RIPE NCC we’re busy working out the implementation of Numbered Working Item (NWI) 10, which deals with clarifying the meaning of the country code attribute in the RIPE Database and the Extended Delegated Statistics.
“> You should register the assignments made to your network across the Globe in the RIPE Database and use "country:" and/or "geoloc:" attributes accordingly. These are not used by pretty much all geolocation providers, we have an INETNUM tagged on NL for years and is still not updated. As a workaround since some geodb didn't update our information at all, we had a NL ASN assigned to advertise this range. All was well until a month ago where the geodb pulled our ASN again and it had change to BE. Now we are 1) desperately contacting geodb parties to update our information as it is NOT pulled from INETNUM (or if it is, only from ALLOCATED PA not ASSIGNED PA) and we simply do not have enough resources to allocate a PA per country. After reaching out to a senior ripe engineer whom was involved in the rollout of the geoloc attributes, it was confirmed this attribute is still not used at all by third party geodb. So why bother updating it. 2) requesting sponsored ASN's for our subsidiaries in other countries since option 1 is just a pain in the *** and would probably keep on failing as information is not pulled correctly. RIPE should take its responsibility and contact their GEOdb partners and have them pull information correctly.”
Dear Stef, Thank you for your comment and for sharing with us your concerns. I believe the best place to share your concerns regarding the update of the Country Code (CC) that took place due to NWI-10 would be the RIPE Database Working Group (DB-WG). The community discussed quite extensively this proposal (i.e. NWI-10) in the DB-WG and once consensus was reached, we (RIPE NCC) got instructed and had no other choice but to start the implementation of it. Similarly to what we do with all accepted policy proposals. However, I can guarantee you that we ensured before making any changes that: 1. all the impacted Resource Holders (of Implementation Phase 1) were informed in advance to adjust if needed any network settings. Your LIR was one of those that was informed. 2. the Geolocation Providers were contacted to be informed about the upcoming changes and to update their algorithms so to be able to provide the geolocation services accurately. We contacted the Geolocation providers that are listed on our Website (https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/db/tools/geolocation-in-the-ripe-database) As a suggestion to solve your problem, have you tried to contact MaxMind via the following form: https://support.maxmind.com/geoip-data-correction-request/correct-a-geoip-location/ Also, have you tried to see if the situation will be improved, after you have updated the related INETNUM objects (allocation and assignments) and included the "geoloc:" attribute on those? In any case, we are happy to discuss your case in more details. Feel free to send us an email to <lir-help@ripe.net>. Kind regards, Stefania Fokaeos Internet Resource Analyst RIPE NCC
“Break compatibility? Why? RIPE database is working well, no reason for fix something what is working well.”
Dear Olga, Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Could you please clarify into more details what do you mean? The RIPE Database information remains as it is. Only additional information was added in the ORGANISATION objects, which show where each holder is legally established.
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