Background
Databases and techniques exist for determining the geographical location of hosts. This project tries to unify them into one conherent database whereby flexible and robust tools will be developed to both store, query and determine the location of any given device that has an IP address.
The ability to accurately and simply gather information about the location of a host on the internet is very important for the visualisation and diagnostics of networks. Information sources can come from two places: direct (
Goals
The goals of the project are:
Determine numerous ways of gathering and determining the geographical location of a host, by all means possible
- lookup in geoiptools
- lookup in DNS loc
- Tulip
- other
Create a flexible database for the storage of topological information of ip nodes in mysql, with emphasis on data consistence and speed.
- Considerations for the latitude and longitudinal locations of a host
- Considerations for the potential error in the measurement
- Storage of Country, City, Street, and even Building and floor of host
location. - Consideration of automomous system of the ip
- Storage of subnet information for the IP node.
Design, Implement and Document robust API for database access
- supported programming languages should include: Perl, Java and (potentially) Python
- performance tests with languages, with code profiling to determine where the cycles are being used for each.
- Thourough documentation and example usage of API.
Gathering and Storage of information (population of database)
- Using methods determined above and demonstration of API.