Location.

[Raven]

I'm puzzled and hoping one of you teckie folk can explain. I couldn't sleep and got up and went online,had to sign into EBay and later got this email from them about it. It says the location is down in England somewhere and it's way way off. This is not the first time Ebay has done this.See attachment.Any ideas?You cannot view this attachment.

[automatically pruned due to age]

[Alex]

Was that about the time you signed in Raven ?   It's happened to me too where they've got the IP address wrong - Shrewsbury in my case - but the time was correct and it was me logging in.  One of the techies will know about it 

[klondike]

If the time and browser tally you can certainly forget it.

They probably got your location from your IP address and the geolocation database can be wrong. The old style format for IP addresses IPv4 actually ran out of available addresses some years ago and upgrading everything to IPv6 is laggardly. The result is a trade in IP blocks (range of numbers) and your ISP probably bought some in and the ownership and location of use has not been updated.


June 13, 2022, 10:03:05 AM
I just checked using the admin account and the IP you are using shows as being owned by Three and  I'm pretty sure that you aren't on mobile. Location in the check I just did says Stevenston on the west coast of Scotland.

[Raven]

Alex, Yes the time is correct, I knew it was me signing in. 

klondike, Yes we do have Three WiFi, It's hard wired into the desk computer. We only pay £18 a month for it Sky wanted more than double that and we refused to pay it. Virgin doesn't come up this far north or it didn't a few years back. I used to have it in Perth but again It just got too expensive. The beauty of this one is it's able to just be plugged into a socket and the WiFi connects to everything mobile, phones tablets ect. I can unplug it and take it down to Perth if I wanted and just plug it in there. But the computer is quite old and needs to be properly connected with a wire.
As for the West Coast, we'll that's a bit nearer than down south.

[klondike]

Another one showed you in the Thames 

The location is based on what the ISP tells them. Maybe Three themselves have been switching IP blocks around and either didn't update their records or the last time they were queried by the service eBay is using was a while ago. It could even be that their datacentre covers a very big area and the location given will be the datacentre only anyway.

It's usually dodgy trying to get a location from a mobile broadband service user anyway as they don't usually allocate IPs to each individual device (for pretty obvious reasons given the shortage of addresses).

What they do is called NATing. You sit behind a big router at a Three datacentre and you and many others share the same public IP address (the one servers on the internet see)  The router sorts out who incoming data needs to go to because it records who the queries come from and matches them up.

[Raven]

Bit pointless having an IP Address then isn't it. I suppose I'm lucky it even has me in the UK.
Is it different again if I'm away from home and using the 4G on my phone, as I sometimes do?

[klondike]

If you don't have an IP address then you don't have any internet access.

The forum keeps track of two IP addresses per poster. I'm not sure what apart from a change of IP triggers the second to be stored - maybe time. Anyway both recorded for you are actually the same one. When you move away from home and take your Three router with you it will obviously connect to a different cell but will still be using the same SIM (just like a mobile phone). Just how the Three system decides which external IP you will get I don't know. It could be that they only have a handful of datacentres that connect into the internet in Scotland - possibly even only the one - maybe at that West Coast location. I don't know. 

I see that some are IPv6 format a quick check on one shows theirs is BT. 

[klondike]

Well that was odd. 

I turned off the Wifi on my mobile and posted in a non visible section that I use for checking things out. Checking on the IP and it seems I've been transported to Scotland. Somewhere called Lockwinnock between Glasgow and Stevenston 

The database still shows both IPs the same. The control panel only shows one anyway. Maybe some housekeeping routine will update the database later. I'm not fussed enough to remember to check TBH as IP addresses are of limited importance. All I check is if new signups are from Russia or similar. I think a mod I installed is keeping them out anyway as there haven't even been any of those recently.

[Raven]

Well that was odd.

I turned off the Wifi on my mobile and posted in a non visible section that I use for checking things out. Checking on the IP and it seems I've been transported to Scotland. Somewhere called Lockwinnock between Glasgow and Stevenston 

Well Welcome to Scotland klondike The West Coast is beautiful and just for the record that area is called Ayrshire.