IANA Country Codes

No longer published as country codes?

[dstiles]

I had occasion yesterday to look up a new (to me) country code at www(.)iana(.)org/domains/root/db

I have used this many times over the years to decide what country to allocate to IP ranges in my blocklist database depending on information in DNS, and to decide whether or not the country is a threat (RU, UA, CN etc).

The IANA page now gives the country code (eg RU) followed by the words Country Code (or whatever classification) in the next column and then the organisation responsible for maintaining the zone. The latter, fair enough, but another column is required giving the actual country. I eventually tracked down, with the aid of ixquick, that mm is Myanmar, of which I'd never before heard (and still do not know where it is).

Has anyone else come across this? Is there another list I haven't yet found? Certainly I can't find an appropriate list on the IANA site and finding it via a search engine is tedious.

[incrediBILL]

I've never used that resource before but I knew Myanmar (formerly Burma Shave) was MM ;)

[jmccormac]

The ISO3660-1 list is on Wikipedia ( [en.wikipedia.org...] ). The other thing to watch out for is that some IP ranges might be reclassified as EU (regional) or similar with the country code being decided by the local regional IP registry (ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/LACNIC etc). Also the UK uses UK rather than GB. I was doing a spreadsheet of gTLD domains counts by country/country codes and the EU and regional ones were a bit problematic. Also new country codes go live periodically (.ss being a recent one).

Regards...jmcc

[lucy24]

Ouch. I use this one
[iso.org...]
"Last updated: 2013-02-06" Has something important happened since then?

This version craftily leaves out "uk" entirely so you don't have to stop and figure out whether it means Great Britain Plus Etcetera (country), or Ukrainian (language, where the country is "ua", not to be confused with the Emirates, which are "ae").

[jmccormac]

I hope not. I just finished that table and don't want to have to undo it. :) Not all of those country codes have active TLDs though. The European Union's EU isn't actually a genuine country code but I've seen Akamai use it for some of its ranges in Europe. The problem is that once you go below the /24 or class C ranges, the subnets occur and it is these that often provide the most problems for the off-the-shelf Geo IP packages as the subnet data is only in the bulk WHOIS data from the IP registries. An IP subnet could, for example be assigned to a business in Ireland hosting on US webservers. With UPC (one of the biggest EU cable operators, some Geo IP software might consider an IP as being assigned to Austria whereas it could be an Irish, British, Dutch or Austrian IP for example. It all has to do with how well the WHOIS data is parsed (if at all). This is why blocking by country is not 100% effective.

Regards...jmcc

[brotherhood of LAN]

I use this one [data.iana.org] on the same site as it's simple to parse, to determine valid domain names/email addresses at the top TLD level.

It seems to be updated daily and would perhaps be a good initial flag raiser for new TLDs.

[dstiles]

Jim - a sorry day when wiki is more informative than a souce site. :( I think that's eventually where I got the mm data.

EU - some IP ranges are so classed and there is a .eu TLD, although it's only used as far as I can tell to stop other people masquerading through it. Short-range subnets I'm not concerned with: they get classified according to the wider range, otherwise I'd be far too busy to do any real work. :)

Lucy - thanks. That should do it, although a pity it's organised alphabetically by country name not by code. :)

Brotherhood - that shows up here as just a list of codes with no country or other text beside it. Mind you, firefox also loaded a .deb file into itself today instead of downloading it. It may be broken. :(

My opinion of IANA over the last couple of years has dropped somethat. They seem to be over-complicating things (eg xml rather than html for pages) and now this. Still, that seems to be the way the internet is going: ever more complicated and ever more vulnerable.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Yeah , the link I pasted is just that... and would require a separate resource if you wanted to know the country/area assigned to it.

[lucy24]

organised alphabetically by country name not by code

I bet you figured that one out five minutes after the edit deadline passed :)

[dstiles]

Er... No. I would still be in the dark had you not prompted. Even then, clicking on Code failed the first time because I never normally enable javascript. :)

Thanks for the info, anyway.