networking - More Detailed Trace of my Server's IP?

06
2014-04
  • Nicholas Yost

    I use Geolocating services to see where my server seems to be residing, and it is resolving to New York. But the server is actually a cloud-server located in the Netherlands. The hosting company is adamant that it is actually in the Netherlands, but I recently received a DMCA complaint for something my users were doing. I bought it in the Netherlands to avoid stuff like this, but if it appears to be in the US for everyone else, it could impact my business. I am also confident that I would not have received the complaint if the server actually traced to the Netherlands. How do I trace an IP and actually get the location? My server company is DigitalOcean, if that matters. This seems to be unique to them.

    I've tried these services: http://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip_demo http://www.geocodeip.com/ http://ipinfodb.com/ip_locator.php

    I've contacted support and they just tell me that RAIN might use their office location in NYC as the location of the server, not it's actual location. How can I get around this and actually get the server to indicate it is in the Netherlands?

    • Answers
  • Will.Beninger

    traceroute should be fairly indicative since it is the path your traffic takes to get to your server. If the last router it hits is in New York it might be far more likely that it is located there. Perform one and check the IP addresses that are reported along the way.

    Currently my public IP address puts me in a location nowhere near where I am actually situated since my company VPNs all their traffic between locations. More than likely, the company you are dealing with might do the same.

    Speak to the company you are renting hosting from and discuss how the traffic is routed and if things need to change. More than likely the IP address is just registered in New York to some company and router from there.

    Finally:
    The majority of DMCA complaints are auto-generated and do not take into consideration where you are physically located. I have received quite a few with a server that is very obviously situated in Europe and for services that I'm not even hosting that were just picked up on keywords and tags. Don't take them as the all knowing service.

  • Jonathan

    check to see that you arent using any CDN.

    a CDN [content delivery network] will have locations all over the world, and will serve the content from the closest location to the requesting machine, so if you are in DC and traceroute to your server it might send you to new-york..


    • Related Question

    traceroute - How to trace the routes to all hosts in a subnet?
  • uggla

    I am trying to trace the routes to all live hosts in a subnet. How would one design the command? I've tried the commands below, to no avail. Man pages does not make me any wiser.

    mtr -c 1 --report 10.10.16.X
mtr -c 1 --report 10.10.16.0/24

traceroute 10.10.16.X
traceroute 10.10.16.0/24

    • Related Answers
  • Olli

    There is no such thing available. Almost always all IPs in same block are using same routes (typical routing works with subnet masks).

    In Linux, you can use short script, for example

    for i in $(seq 1 255); do
 traceroute 10.10.16.$i
done

    This prints route to each address, and do not include any comparing functions to detect different routes to different addresses.