Publishing your own location data

Putting LOC records into your DNS zones is easy. All versions of BIND 8 as well as the more recent versions of BIND 4 (sites still running BIND 4 should upgrade to 4.9.7 for security reasons anyway) support LOC records by default.

Then, assuming you've already determined your latitude and longitude you simply need to put the information into the DNS zone file in the proper format, as shown in the examples below.

loiosh.kei.com. LOC     42 21 43.528 N 71 05 06.284 W 12m
kei.com.        LOC     42 21 43.528 N 71 05 06.284 W 12m 30m
vrx.net.        LOC     43 40 N 79 25 W 30m

Note that the data are expressed in degrees/minutes/seconds format (minutes and seconds defaulting to zero if omitted) and that altitude must be given, but the size field can be omitted (as with the precision fields, not used in these examples).

While putting in entries for every machine on a large network may not be practical, putting in a "catch-all" LOC record for the domain as a whole (as with the vrx.net example, above) should be relatively easy (and, for many sites, will be just as useful). Note that this should not be a wildcard record; the semantics of wildcard records mean that it won't be found when querying for a name that has other data in the DNS.

Where possible, though, putting in explicit LOC records for news servers, Web caches, MBONE or 6bone tunnel endpoints, and routers will make it easier for those doing visualization work to get specific location data.

Now that you've put the data in, you may want to test it against my LOC to Maps demo.