Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


why is my address seen as being located in the US? (APNIC/Japan)
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

why is my address seen as being located in the US? (APNIC/Japan)

elos42elos42 Member
edited September 2020 in General

I set up a proxy server on a VPS from a cloud provider in Japan. Normally, I am greeted by Japanese language versions of major websites, including Goog, whenever I set up my VPN on any server in Japan, including from this cloud provider.
But this time, I was being greeted as if I was visiting from the US. I spun up another vps with an IP in the same subnet, and it was being seen as being located in Japan.
Though not intentional, I am surprised by this discovery. Of course, I prefer it if websites show me their English language version, instead of me trying to fumble about trying to locate the language button.
Most of the Geolocation apis and websites show both IPs as belonging to Japan. However, bigdatacloud "correctly" showed the US-perceived one as being located in the US, while the JP-perceived one as being located in JP.
Does anyone have any ideas about what's going on?
Strangely, the location within the US is being reported as Coffeyville, a nondescript town which not home to any datacenters. But the town is notable in one way -- it's almost exactly in the middle/center of the US. Is it possible that some computer somewhere took an average longitude and latitude for the US mainland and assigned it to my IP?
Any ideas what's going on?
PS: The IP address is allocated from APNIC and correctly marked as belonging to JP in their records. I'm located in Asia and this behavior is seen when I'm both signed in and signed off.

Comments

  • lentrolentro Member, Host Rep

    Perhaps it's i18next?

    You can detect the browser's language, which might be the culprit.

    Then again, maybe it's something else if overnight, every major website changed from Japanese to English on the VPN.

    Thanked by 1elos42
  • IP location databases are normally very innacurate. They normally base the location on the following factors

    • The country of the prefix inetnum
    • Geolocation tag in the inetnum
    • The country of the organisation holding the ASN.
  • TheLinuxBugTheLinuxBug Member
    edited September 2020

    @HyperK9 said:
    IP location databases are normally very innacurate. They normally base the location on the following factors

    • The country of the prefix inetnum
    • Geolocation tag in the inetnum
    • The country of the organisation holding the ASN.

    This. Probably the company it's self is own in the US or has purchased the assets with a US holding company. When you originally purchase the IPs they will be located to the business that purchased them -- you can of course later go and update GeoIP databases to reflect where they are actually used, however, this doesn't mean that all DBs that exist will be updated and can thus result in mixed results like you are witnessing.

    There really isn't much you can do about this if the IPs have already had their geo location updated by the provider but some DBs just are not updated fully (yet).

    my 2 cents.

    Cheers!

    Thanked by 1elos42
  • elos42elos42 Member
    edited September 2020

    Thanks. I did go through all these possibilities.

    But there's one scenario in which all these explanations fail:

    Suppose the IP address is 133.22.11.00, and suppose it shows itself correctly as Japan.
    Now, all the others in 133.22.11.xx subnet also shows Japan.

    But when I move slightly forward or backward, 133.22.18.xx, it will switch to US.

    Again, when you move to 133.22.25.xx, it goes back to Japan.

    Also, these are all registered with APNIC, and as you might know, APNIC and ARIN have proper GeoIP fields in their RDAP responses, and all these IPs return JP in the country field. Anyway, I'm not complaining, as it gives me flexibility to use either locations on demand.

    One thing is correct though - the main, parent subnet (usually /18 or /20) is shown as belonging to/registered in the US, which might be why some of the smaller subnets within in are showing US locations occassionally.

    The other explanation I can think of is that they are homed differently.

  • @elos42 said:
    Thanks. I did go through all these possibilities.

    But there's one scenario in which all these explanations fail:

    Suppose the IP address is 133.22.11.00, and suppose it shows itself correctly as Japan.
    Now, all the others in 133.22.11.xx subnet also shows Japan.

    But when I move slightly forward or backward, 133.22.18.xx, it will switch to US.

    Again, when you move to 133.22.25.xx, it goes back to Japan.

    Also, these are all registered with APNIC, and as you might know, APNIC and ARIN have proper GeoIP fields in their RDAP responses, and all these IPs return JP in the country field. Anyway, I'm not complaining, as it gives me flexibility to use either locations on demand.

    One thing is correct though - the main, parent subnet (usually /18 or /20) is shown as belonging to/registered in the US, which might be why some of the smaller subnets within in are showing US locations occassionally.

    The other explanation I can think of is that they are homed differently.

    It is possible that the owner of the IP has tried to correct specific lower subnets (eg. a /29 of that block), if it was anycasted or something, maybe by the previous owners.

    You can see this normally on Residential IP Ranges, and even Googles ranges.
    For example, Google's geofeed (a CSV list showing the locations of blocks of IP Addresses by the providers) shows IPv6 in /56s in different countries, and IPv4 also like this:
    193.200.222.0/28,IN,,,
    193.200.222.112/28,AR,,,
    193.200.222.128/28,JP,,
    So in one subnet, they have locations in Japan, Argentina and India. I assume this is the most accurate explanation for your situation, but again it depends on the IP Location database you are going off. On Maxmind you can see what subnet the location is set for when you search in their demo.

    Thanked by 1elos42
  • @HyperK9 said: It is possible that the owner of the IP has tried to correct specific lower subnets (eg. a /29 of that block), if it was anycasted or something, maybe by the previous owners.

    If this is google, they also detect your local timezone with JS and other stuff, your browser language settings and do geo based off not IP

    Thanked by 1elos42
  • @hzr said:

    @HyperK9 said: It is possible that the owner of the IP has tried to correct specific lower subnets (eg. a /29 of that block), if it was anycasted or something, maybe by the previous owners.

    If this is google, they also detect your local timezone with JS and other stuff, your browser language settings and do geo based off not IP

    Yep, they also accept geofeeds from the ISP though. We send them through a geofeed through the ISP portal. But I think for each IP, the end user would change that based off that you said

    Thanked by 1elos42
  • Where is the physical server located? In US or Japan?

Sign In or Register to comment.