Location services not working well due to rate limiting

[davidmhewitt]

I gave myself the task to look into why location services weren't working properly anymore. Aside from the agent not running (fixed in elementary/pantheon-agent-geoclue2#31), the MLS API that Geoclue uses is being rate limited.

In /etc/geoclue/geoclue.conf, we can see we're using this URL (where the API key is geoclue):
https://location.services.mozilla.com/v1/geolocate?key=geoclue

At the time of writing, that's giving me 403 errors with "You have exceeded your daily limit.". If we sign up for an elementary specific API key and configure it in our patched geoclue package, at least we won't be sharing a key among all the other OSes that have left the default config in and are then less likely to get rate limited, info here:
https://location.services.mozilla.com/api

There's also info on that page about how to run your own instance of the MLS service which may be good for respecting privacy. But mozilla are pretty respectable anyway, so 🤷‍♂️

[danirabbit]

My guess is that @btkostner would rather us sign up with Mozilla, but pinging him in case

[danirabbit]

I sent an email to the Mozilla locations services team. I'll update here when I hear back :)

[btkostner]

It wouldn't be hard to host this our self. It might bump our hosting cost though.

[danirabbit]

Heard back from the Mozilla team and they’re gonna issue us a key. So sounds like we can do that until we decide we need/want our own server