[Dxspider-support] Call Sign Validation Exceptions

[Brendan Minish]

On Fri, 2011-03-04 at 10:18 -0700, Jim Reisert AD1C wrote:

> 
> Why?  Because some software will reject DX spots if the numerical IP
> address is from a different country than the spotter callsign.  For
> example, if W1AN connected to the cluster from an IP address in
> Ireland.

This is just a nonsensical thing to filter on !
for several reasons 

1/ geographical IP databases all appear to either be missing netblocks,
riddled with inaccuracies and out of date 

2/ many of the larger ISP's  (here in Europe anyway) use the same
net-blocks in several countries. At least 2 major Irish ISP's do assign
on occasion IP addresses that according to databases are in the UK or
Netherlands  

3/ Where does this leave access Via VPN's, VSAT providers, Corporate
networks etc. I know of several cluster users who use VPN's route their
general traffic around 'national' firewalls that are popular in some
less than entirely democratic regimes.
When I was on VSAT my assigned Public IP resolved to Germany   

My cluster is now on a server in the UK, In the past it has been on
various servers in the US, does this now mean that spots I make from the
console will be discarded because the source IP is a UK one yet I am an
EI  

Adding support for EI/W1AN is not as simple as just adding support for
it to spider, care needs to be taken that it won't have unintended
consequences to other nodes on the network who may not handle the EI/
part of the call correctly. It won't make anyone happy if each spot ends
up appearing twice because some nodes discarded the EI/ part of the
call     

-- 
73
Brendan EI6IZ