Technical Tip: Registered location and physical location of IP addresses

Fortinet has deployed looking-glass servers all over the world to aid in locating physical IP addresses.

The physical location of the IP address is determined by measuring the looking glass server's latency to the target IP address.

In some scenarios, Geo-IP-based firewall policies do not work as expected. This may be because an IP address is being used in a different country than the previously registered country.

Showing the actual geographic location of the IP is very important in a variety of fields ranging from location-based services to malware detection. However, the Fortinet database also includes the registration country data separately from geographic/physical location data. 

Use the following commands to set up the required configuration:

config firewall policy

edit

set geoip-match

next

end