Simon, "anyone know the reason for this?" - 'Cause it ain't science!
There are a gazillion geolocation databases out there and they all have different information - so why does this happen? IP addresses are handed out to companies and ISPs in fairly large blocks. IANA originates all the IP addresses these are given in very large blocks to regional registries - in Australia this is APNIC. Once these are handed out, they then often get broken up further and distributed to others. (A bit like feeding the 5000!). Companies, like HP, and ISPs, will manage their registered address space in a way that suits their network topology. Unfortunately the only official record would be the registered office address when the initial block is handed out by APNIC (in the case of IP address requested by Australian orgs). My current home IP address is in the 203.217.64.0/21 range - which according to http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl would put it in Perth (because it is owned iiNet). Now iiNet are under no obligation to tell anyone where they have used these IPs. Unless they bother to fill in the DNS LOC record (which can record long/lat) then there is no way you are going to get the location. That being said it seems that many organisations think that there is value in maintaining a database. A few I have include http://www.ip2location.com and http://www.hostip.info. The latter at least allowed you to change their database entry for your IP. In my case my address showed up as Brisbane, which I duly changed to the town nearest me. The issue of course is that my IP address is dynamic, and at any time iiNet might choose to reorganise their IP address structure. They aren't going to be telling anyone about it. So I guess unless someone can come up with a compelling reason for geolocation, it really is going to be a fun thing to play with, but it isn't going to be very credible. (People claim it would be useful for a Pizza franchise to know which store to direct your order to. Another possible use might be to better perform routing decisions in an environment where a host might be moving, say a VoIP-equipped mobile phone. But IMHO it won't happen as it is to easy to spoof or just the issue that most IP connected devices just don't know where they are) BTW It looks like Moodle might be using http://netgeo.caida.org/perl/netgeo.cgi - because it returned Milton NSW for my address. However you might note from their page that pretty well disclaim any accuracy with their results. Martin Visser, CISSP Network and Security Consultant Consulting & Integration Technology Solutions Group - HP Services 410 Concord Road Rhodes NSW 2138 Australia Mobile: +61-411-254-513 Fax: +61-2-9022-1800 E-mail: martin.visserAThp.com This email (including any attachments) is intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above and may contain information that is confidential, proprietary or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify HP immediately by return email and then delete the email, destroy any printed copy and do not disclose or use the information in it. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Simon Sent: Wednesday, 2 November 2005 11:10 PM To: 'SLug Users' Subject: [SLUG] IP Address Source Hi all, We are running Moodle as our Intranet and it works well. One of the features is that when it displays the log of failed logins you can click on the IP address to see where it came from, however all external addresses either seem to be in Milton, NSW or Marina Del Rey, California, United States anyone know the reason for this? ------------------------------------ OLMC Simon Bryan IT Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] LMB 14 North Parramatta Direct Number:88381200 SwitchBoard: 96833300 fax: 98901466 mobile: 0414238002 ------------------------------------ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
