Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2022 May 2

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May 2

IP address location

Where does WHOIS get location information for Australian addresses? https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/49.198.51.54 shows me in Brisbane, but I'm really in Melbourne. https://whois-referral.toolforge.org/gateway.py?lookup=true&ip=49.198.51.54 says my "geolite2" is in Brisbane and my "geo_ipinfo" is in Melbourne. I guess whatismyipaddress might be wrong if I were in some remote regional area, but I don't understand why it's so badly wrong for an IP address from a major metropolitan area. It's not the physical address of my Internet provider, Optus, which is headquartered in Sydney. 49.198.51.54 (talk) 21:41, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

WHOIS doesn't have IP geolocation. Do you mean whatismyipaddress.com? Nil Einne (talk) 00:59, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Anyway when I visit the above link, it says "Geolocation data from IP2Location." Confusingly [1] says "It came from the IP address geolocation service used to look at the IP address of wherever you were when you visited our site." I don't really understand what it's trying to say since I didn't and possibly you didn't visit a geolocation service when visiting their site. Maybe it means if you visit geolocation service that gets data from whatismyipaddress.com, it's forwarded to and cached by whatismyipaddress.com and this is what is displayed so it's possible they don't always get it from IP2Location. You can probably look a bit more on IP2 Location's site and here [2] for more info on the geolite2 IP database. In the absence of more info, it's generally difficult to say why a particular address might be inaccurate but I expect a common reason may be a geolocation change perhaps coming from the ISP moving their address space as part of their efforts of coping with IPv4 address exhaustion (which happened long ago but ISPs may still find it useful to move things around to manage things). You may or may not be able to use [3] and [4] to try and improve your geolocation on whatismyupaddress.com if you're willing to allowed your browser to provide it (and it knows).Nil Einne (talk) 02:06, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

I picked those links from Special:Contributions/49.198.51.54. I guess I thought that was what WHOIS consisted of? I've heard of badly wrong coordinates, like this story from America, but they tend to be all located at some central point for the company, not 1000km away from the company and 1500km away from the user, or they're in the centre of a region (like the American example) rather than being in another big city. And I think they're more often when a company has a ton of dynamic IP addresses and yours changes all the time, but I've had this IP address since 21 February. But it isn't a big deal (I don't want to try to get something fixed), so I was just curious. 49.198.51.54 (talk) 06:22, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

All I can say is the geolocation is sometimes wrong, which is why we have a choice of geolocation links (you can find many more scattered throughout various admin tools). Unfortunately there's only room for two links in that place, so we use the most agreeable (relatively accurate and spam-free) geolocation links. Several other sites will have it right.[5][6] The WHOIS link does indeed pull in data from separate databases - it is not a normal part of WHOIS, but something designed by one of us, for use by us. If you want standard WHOIS, try this Unlike WHOIS, there is no central registry of geolocations, and it comes from a variety of sources. Sometimes ISPs provide the info, sometimes it's based on user behaviour, or users, and sometimes there's a mix of proprietary databases and no one really knows where they get that from. And often geolocation will change as IPs get moved around. Australia in particular has a weird way of assigning IP addresses. Personally, I would be most persuaded by looking at "meb3.vic.optusnet.com.au" in your IP's hostname, where "meb3" and "vic" probably mean exactly what you think. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 15:02, 3 May 2022 (UTC)