Geofeeds are new feature described in RFC 8805 which allows to self-publish Geo location information in a machine readable format for people who own their own IP address space on the Internet. From now, we are parsing this data for IPFire Location to further improve the accuracy of our database - especially for large distributed companies like cloud providers.

Although the standard is already a couple of years old, it has not gained much adoption, yet. Maybe it doesn't need that, because not every Autonomous System on the Internet has a complicated layout. Some are simply just one rack in one data center and maybe have a mirror in a different building in the same city. Some other networks are larger and span across many countries. They also change fast as they are growing and for geo location algorithms to "learn" about those changes will take some time.

Currently, IPFire Location is parsing 682 geofeeds, but some of them are from organisations like Disney, Fastly, Bahnhof, and many more - giving us better insights into their network and where an IP address is located.

In the vast majority of the networks, this does not change anything on our database, because our algorithm has already been a lot more precise than our competitors. However, we will be able to detect some changes slightly quicker now.

How to get this? All the changes are included in the recently released libloc 0.9.17 and have already been automatically deployed for all IPFire users, and if you require location information running Debian or Fedora, there are packages readily available.