New to board, sry if this is redundant. I’ve been trying to get a location on an IP address. But the header is giving me locations I no not to be where they r. I’m running a vpn and a free account through hush. Would that scramble there IP address through yahoo as well?
As in, you’ve got the public IP address of another person, and you’re trying to figure out where that person physically is? It doesn’t really work like that, despite what CSI tells you. The IP will tell you where their ISP is, which is typically, but not always, near them. And if they are running through a proxy/VPN/anonymizer, it could literally be anywhere in the world.
The IP address only shows the location of their ISP server, which does not necessarily match their location. My old dial-up ISP was actually located in San Francisco, which is 400 miles away from where I lived. And this is presuming they aren’t using a proxy server or accessing the web via the TOR Network, in which case all bets are off.
ETA: Ninja’d!
Nobody can get a good fix on me (not that I’m trying to hide) as my ISP is AT&T, so anything that tries to identify me by the ISP variably thinks I’m in Texas, Georgia, or Charlotte. (Only one of these is correct!) It’s probably just an artifact of what particular dynamic IP address I’ve got at the moment - I think they release and renew once a week.
My work laptop connects via a VPN, and it’s a coin toss whether that terminates in Minnesota or Arizona, probably based on where the enterprise load balancers send me.
Network traffic usually enters the public Internet pretty soon after it leaves the person’s computer, which means the information various databases have about where ISPs are located will serve to give you fairly good information about where the people using those ISPs are as well. You can find these databases by searching for ‘IP geolocation’ on Google.
However, traffic can bounce around in an internal network for some arbitrary number of hops before entering the public Internet, meaning it can come out arbitrarily far away from where it originated. TOR is good for this, but some ISPs do it all on their own, as other posters have mentioned. And, of course, sometimes the geolocation databases are just misleading: If an ISP serves a large area, there isn’t enough information to associate an IP address with the specific town the traffic is actually coming from. You’ll get the town the ISP is headquartered in, instead, which may be hundreds of miles from the town you actually want.
So ? If you get a public Ip address, thats the IP address set in your equipment and the packet flows out to the destination servers with THAT ip address. The ISP doesn’t relabel the packets due to routing. (TOR is designed to hide all info like location…so there is no comparison with ordinary ISP operations.)
The cause of misleading geo-location is that the doing by IP address is of course completely flakey.
The real issue is the geo-location databases… How did they get their info ?
The ARIN (etc) system could record the info down to the C class, or 253 homes, BUT the ISP doesn’t update ARIN with such accuracy… and they may not even be able to do it themselves, they may allocate more randomly, they may trade blocks of ip addresses between NOC’s … eg to do upgrades… they start using a new pool of ip addresses, and then stop using the old pool. The result is that they start to allocate ip addresses that were used from ALL OVER, to the place.
The geo-location databases that have a location for every Ip address individually ?
They got it from websites which asked the user for their location.
Probably those sex ones which make money from every possible method.
No your use of VPN does not affect what Yahoo says about there ip address.
If they use a VPN they can get Ip addresses from “Timbuktu”. (Is that a worldwide idiom ? )
That’s certainly one method. A large number of ISPs reverse-DNS their IPs with physical locations, which makes it pretty easy.
And a growing number of providers are now providing caching services for for various popular destinations–there’s a decent chance you’re not going out to the internet to get to Youtube nowadays, instead, Google has some servers at your ISPs local switch that will handle traffic from that local area.
Wrong, of course: ISPs relabel packets all the time. That’s what NAT is and NAT is still very common.
This almost makes sense.
No. C class doesn’t mean any specific number of homes: Some addresses can be unused, and some can be used for more than one subscriber as long as port numbers disambiguate, as is the case with NAT. And then you have to take dynamic address allocation into account, which admittedly isn’t as big of a deal as it used to be in the dial-up days.
This has always confused me. As we speak, I am typing this from 192.168.2.1. Is that the address of the Belkin wireless router that the NIC on my motherboard is connected to, or is it the router that feeds that router, which is the one that Time-Warner Cable gave me? If I want to know my “real” IP address, is it simply the first IP address I hop to if I run a tracert command, which is 176.173.XXX.X? Or is the one after that? Or the one after that? I live in Simi Valley, California, and I never leave Simi until the fifth hop, which almost invariably takes me to LAX (Los Angeles International Airport), Tustin (in Orange County), or the Caltrans Building in downtown L.A. So where does NAT actually occur, and what is going on before I leave town? Sorry if this question doesn’t even make sense; some ignorance of terminology and/or physical networking may be showing through.
It’s probably the address of the network interface in your computer. The Belkin device will have an internal network interface on the same network, say 192.168.2.254, and an external interface that may have a publicly-routable address, or may go through further levels of NAT within Time Warner’s network before actually emerging on to the internet, but anyway at some point your NIC’s address gets translated into a public address possibly shared with many other users, in which case traceable back to you by means of the translated source port.
Tracert won’t really tell you much about your own IP address, be that your real one or the translated one that the outside world sees. It shows you which routers your packets pass through on the way to the destination.
There are many sites that will display your current public IP address. I tend to use the minimalist http://icanhazip.com/ .