4 ms·

The usual story is: 1. Add an IP that has been freed from another use to a CG-NAT Pool. 2. Get complaints from customers about being hard banned from things l

The usual story is: 1. Add an IP that has been freed from another use to a CG-NAT Pool. 2. Get complaints from customers about being hard banned from things like Netflix, Sport Streaming and VPNs or other utilities. 3. Investigate, no IP reputation issues. Find some random GEO IP database that has a side business in selling lists of VPNS or other geo breakout tools. They have listed this IP for some random reason. Almost never nefarious. 4. Give it 3 weeks for the Geoip nard to update from the wrong classification (harmful) to some kind of also wrong but unharmful classification like "Datacentre" 5. Customers can stream The Witcher again. Yay. Really while ipv6 should be a solution here, another very good solution would be the removal of such useless middlemen from the face of the earth.

kotaKat 11mo ago
What I'd give at #2 to have some kind of backdoor ISP contact to these vendors to be able to ask "what exactly the hell is going on here?". Having to troubleshoot things like Playstation Network bans ("or is it a ban?") behind CGNAT is an interesting adventure that typically leads nowhere.
- protocolture 11mo ago
  Few if any of them permit outside contact. I remember having to get a customer to escalate their PSN case after removing the GEOIP configuration because PSN didnt reflect the change immediately. Its really difficult from a customer service perspective, because the error messages tend to pin the blame on the ISP, despite it wholly being a circumstance of the content owner. You do get lucky, IIRC theres a few blog posts where people go into detail about how to contact some providers, but I found that some of them rotated those emails pretty regularly.
7bit 11mo ago
As someone who read all books and played the third game: People should totally be banned from watching Netflix's Witcher. On a more serious note, I used GeoIP when it was free and it was a godsend to reduce malicious connection attempts to my webserver without impacting 99 % of my "clients" (not paying customers). These kind of services *are* helpful. Wehterh you should rely on them when you have millions of customers is a different story altogether.
- protocolture 11mo ago
  >On a more serious note, I used GeoIP when it was free and it was a godsend to reduce malicious connection attempts to my webserver without impacting 99 % of my "clients" (not paying customers). Yeah, I think the issue is that, if you have 30 paying customers with, lets say, a canadian ip address and a canadian credit card, and then one bloke connects from the UK by that ip address, its daft that you just blacklist the ip and take all those customers offline. Personally I would start with a polite notice to the ISP, as its likely someones running a proxy and they should theoretically be as interested to remove it as you are.
  - 7bit 11mo ago
    I'm talking about Indian, Pakistani, Chinese IPs. Countries I don't do business with.

kotaKat 11mo ago

What I'd give at #2 to have some kind of backdoor ISP contact to these vendors to be able to ask "what exactly the hell is going on here?". Having to troubleshoot things like Playstation Network bans ("or is it a ban?") behind CGNAT is an interesting adventure that typically leads nowhere.

protocolture 11mo ago
Few if any of them permit outside contact. I remember having to get a customer to escalate their PSN case after removing the GEOIP configuration because PSN didnt reflect the change immediately. Its really difficult from a customer service perspective, because the error messages tend to pin the blame on the ISP, despite it wholly being a circumstance of the content owner. You do get lucky, IIRC theres a few blog posts where people go into detail about how to contact some providers, but I found that some of them rotated those emails pretty regularly.

7bit 11mo ago

As someone who read all books and played the third game: People should totally be banned from watching Netflix's Witcher. On a more serious note, I used GeoIP when it was free and it was a godsend to reduce malicious connection attempts to my webserver without impacting 99 % of my "clients" (not paying customers). These kind of services *are* helpful. Wehterh you should rely on them when you have millions of customers is a different story altogether.

protocolture 11mo ago
>On a more serious note, I used GeoIP when it was free and it was a godsend to reduce malicious connection attempts to my webserver without impacting 99 % of my "clients" (not paying customers). Yeah, I think the issue is that, if you have 30 paying customers with, lets say, a canadian ip address and a canadian credit card, and then one bloke connects from the UK by that ip address, its daft that you just blacklist the ip and take all those customers offline. Personally I would start with a polite notice to the ISP, as its likely someones running a proxy and they should theoretically be as interested to remove it as you are.
- 7bit 11mo ago
  I'm talking about Indian, Pakistani, Chinese IPs. Countries I don't do business with.