Supporting LOC RR's

[Philip Prindeville]

> On Apr 12, 2022, at 6:36 AM, Timothe Litt <litt at acm.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 12-Apr-22 01:46, Philip Prindeville wrote:
>> Does anyone use LOC RR's?  And if so, how?
>> 
>> I've had some Apple devices get seriously confused by their location services and I'm trying to provide strong hints.
>> 
>> It would also be nice to prime WiFi 6 Certified WAPs with their locations based on LOC RR's since we happen to have convenient infrastructure to do exactly that.
>> 
>> Thanks.
>> 
>> 
> LOC RR's are not currently very popular.  But I have some where they provide different locations from geolocation services based on IP address.  Google, for one, reports the city from the LOC record in preference to data associated with the IP address.  I haven't looked recently, but last time I looked, the geolocation services' use of LOC was spotty.  Some used LOC, other's didn't.  For them, it's pretty cheap to mine WHOIS and address block assignments; doing a DNS lookup for each address (and walking up the tree on a miss) gets expensive fairly fast.
> 
> There are some concerns with overly precise LOC records - great if you want a shopper to to show up at your store, perhaps less so if you run a shelter or secure facility.  I've been known to intentionally misplace LOC records so that they're good enough for routing, census, and other coarse applications, but not accurate enough for navigation.
> 
> With respect to part 2: You might also consider that GPS receivers are cheap (every cellphone has one) and retail USB receivers are easily found at less than $20.  This may be a better choice than LOC records.  GPS tells you where you are; LOC tells everyone else...
> 
> HTH
> 
> Timothe Litt
> ACM Distinguished Engineer
> --------------------------
> This communication may not represent the ACM or my employer's views,
> if any, on the matters discussed. 
> 


That's where things get interesting with WiFi 6 Certified Location: it's potentially accurate to a few centimeters if it's done correctly.

I have Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Pro's which don't support this feature, but could if Ubiquiti bothered to add the functionality (it's not on their roadmap as far as I can tell).

In my case, I do split-horizon for my domain in-house and use RFC-1918 addresses, so leaking them with the internet would be pointless anyway.

I'm doing the LOC record matching the domain for now.

I could have LOC records for the WAP's to pre-provision them, but like I said, Ubiquiti isn't caught up yet.

-Philip