How to find historical geolocation for an IP address, perhaps using maxmind?

Question

I was wondering if there is any way to find historical geolocation IP information? Everything I've been able to find discusses current data, but I've been unable to find any way to query a service or DB to, for example, look for information on an IP from a few years ago.

I found this article titled 'How to perform historical IP geolocation lookups' and it does mention maxmind as a potential tool for availability of historical versions but it doesn't mention how to access this data.

Looking through the maxmind api docs I can't seem to find any way to query by date either.

How could one go about finding the location of an IP at a given time in the past? (Extreme accuracy not necessary, an example would be Find the country of this IP address in 2012)

Answer 1

Perhaps there is an easier solution, but it seems that you can download quite a few (not all) old versions of the MaxMind database via the Wayback Machine. For example, this shows the snapshots they have of the binary database. For the CSV files, you'd need to look up the snapshots for specific filenames, and manually change the filenames to the desired 1st-of-month date. For example, here's one.

That said, these posts seem to suggest that IP ranges aren't reassigned to different geographies very often--might not be necessary to worry about getting old versions of the database:

• https://serverfault.com/questions/286025/historical-ip-geo-location
• https://serverfault.com/questions/59167/how-often-do-ip-blocks-get-reassigned-to-different-regions