I have a web service where i do different things according to where ones IP is from. I have a simple test application where i open a WebClient and makes it call the web service. I would like to be able to change the IP on the test application so that it "seems" that it comes from different countries (this will help me test goals in google analytics too) - is this possible - to change/simulate that my application is located in another country (France, Germany, Belgium, England, US, etc...)
It's possible to use a Proxy or an VPN Tunnel, but you'll need an End-Point in the country you want. But, there are also plenty of lists around the web for this.
The other answers more accurately provide a solution, but you could always fake it. Utilise your own small private network and provide a facade to handle IP locationing for DEBUG vs. PRODUCTION mode. All of this of course wouldn't trick Google ;-) but it would help solidify your application.
Sorry for possibly being redundant.
The obvious solution is to "bounce" through a proxy ser ver in each of the countries you wish to test for. I've had good luck in the past with sites such as proxy2free or publicproxyservers in the past.
Other solutions would involve running a client from a host in one of these countries, by way of a VPN / RDP / RAdmin-type session, but that implies owning assets or knowing people in these countries who would trust you with using their hosts in this fashion.
Another solution involves a bit of a program change in your application. By detection of a particular trigger (could be one of several different IPs but from the same country where you reside, could be some added parameter on the url such as &ctrytest=Spain etc.) your application would substitute the IP with one of several foreign IP (from the desired countries) at the level of the country detection logic in your code, but otherwise using the real IP from your client request to actually serve the application.
You probably realize it based on the previous answers, but just to be sure: IP addresses are not a certain indicator of the country a user is in. For example, I once worked in the US for a UK-based company, and we used IP addresses allocated to a UK-based ISP.
Ultrasurf may help: http://ultrasurf.en.softonic.com/
I don't think you can specify though, exactly where in the world your request is sent from.
Related
I have multiple applications making use of Application Insights for Production Data. I'm trying to use the City telemetry field to map our current users. This data appears to be tracked very inconsistently and in most cases (> 75%) is just unavailable.
I understand some customers will be using VPNs which could affect the results, but not to the extent I'm seeing.
Here is the info from the Azure FAQ:
How are City, Country and other geo location data calculated? We look
up the IP address (IPv4 or IPv6) of the web client using GeoLite2.
Browser telemetry: We collect the sender's IP address.
Server telemetry: The Application Insights module collects the client IP
address. It is not collected if X-Forwarded-For is set.
You can configure the ClientIpHeaderTelemetryInitializer to take the IP
address from a different header. In some systems, for example, it is
moved by a proxy, load balancer, or CDN to X-Originating-IP.
Does anyone know how to improve geolocating user cities for App Insights?
IP Geolocation is not 100% accurate and you need to live with it. City accuracy is quite low because the information is guessed from multiple data that change frequently. One way to improve accuracy is to use a service that aggregates data from multiple sources and does it continuously, multiple times a day.
A second manner to enhance the results is to filter based on whether the IP is associated with a proxy by using threat data.
For both purposes, I recommend looking at Ipregistry, a service I work for:
https://api.ipregistry.co/?key=tryout
It would be great if MSFT could provide an example of manually setting the location in Browser telemetry. I understand privacy concerns, but our use-case is for internal enterprise apps used by our field service teams. Since Browsers can access the Geolocation APIs, it's probably straightforward to add that info. It's just a matter of knowing the right way to do it so it's picked up consistently.
Supposed I have two services that need to share and / or exchange data. Both instances are separate from each other, and they shall not know anything about where the other part is located.
Now in order for them to be able to share and / or exchange data, they need to connect to each other.
How do they find each other without the need to configure the IP addresses explicitly? In other words: How could they detect each other automatically?
Basically, I have two ideas:
Pull: You need to have a central service where they register. Then you can ask that service for the address of a service, and that service then returns those data. While this works, it has the drawback that it only shifts the problem to the next level: What if I have multiple instances of that service, and I don't want them to know each other in advance?
Push: Each service broadcasts its own address, so that other services get it to know. Each service repeats this from time to time. Drawback: This does hardly work in the internet.
Any idea of how I could solve this in an intelligent way?
PS: If you want to say so, I'm looking for a way to handle dynamic IPs without the need for a central DNS server.
The usual way is to have some fault-tolerant server where services register and can then look for other services - Curator framework implements that over zookeeper.
If you want autodiscovery then you should probably implement some sort of gossip protocol so that the servers would know which other servers are out there in a reliable way. You should keep in mind that getting gossip protocols right is tricky (e.g. some of past Amazon cloud failures where due to problems in their implementation)
"broadcast packets are not forwarded everywhere on a network, but only to devices within a broadcast domain."
If your devices are on different broadcast domains then broadcasting is not going to work.
You are probably going to have to implement your own central service, unless you can use one of the free dynamic dns servers, for example: Free
I am building a service which requires me to dynamically launch and close servers at many locations around the world, (for example using AWS). When a user visits my domain they need to be assigned to a local server with the lowest latency.
By assignment, I mean that for example the client makes an ajax call to example.com/getData, it should go directly to one particular server that is has been assigned to. Different servers will be doing different computation, so it is not sufficient to have some kind of general load balancing.
What general mechanisms/technology would allow me to 1) Assess the latency between a particular client and any server under my control? 2) Assign a particular client to a particular server? I cannot use just the IP addresses for example, since javascript has domain name based restrictions.
Thanks
Note: I do not have enough reputation to link all the technologies in the response, therefore sometimes you will see the links copied in plain text.
1) Assign users to a local server with the lowest latency is not always possible.
Sometimes the geographically closest server to a user is unexpectedly the one with the highest latency.
To find the lowest latency between your (running) servers and the users is not an easy task.
There might be many different hops (routers) between the client and the server, and any of them at any time can have problems, routes update, packet congestions and so on.
The quickest way to assess the latency is a ping, but it can be that the firewalls block this.
So the best way to achieve this is to use the anycast
All the major CDN providers implement this method. Some use the TCP anycast, which seems to be not recommended, and others UDP anycast. It is an open debate.
Anyway in order to implement anycast you need to be able to peer with the ISP routers, and normally this is not possible. Additionally there are good peers and bad peers.
Finally All this requires a deep knowledge of the routing protocols and the TCP/IP stack.
A quick and dirty solution could be to use BIND with the GEO-IP patch.
So you can define specific dns query responses per country.
What I mean is that, for instance, if you have a server in UK and one in US you can configure BIND to respond to users coming from europe to hit the UK server and users coming from US to hit the US server.
2) To assign a particular client to a particular server you can use the technique I described on the point 1 or you can use a proxy and sticky sessions.
HA-Proxy is a good product to achieve this. (the URL: xy.1wt.eu )
3) if you use the point 1, you will not have problems with cross domain ajax calls. In fact it is completely transparant for the client. For instance for the same domain example.com a user coming from US will resolve it to 1.1.1.1 whereas a user coming from Germany will resolve example.com to 2.2.2.2 (ip addresses are fake and used just as an example).
On a side note, a solution to do cross domain ajax call is JSON-P which has though some drawbacks, like the lack of support for POST.
If I were you I would go with the BIND and GEO-IP, because it would solve all three problems in once. (a part for the latency because is not always true that the geographically closest server is the one with the lowest latency.)
I'm a Java coder and not very familiar with how networks work (other than basic UDP/TCP connections)
Say I have servers running on machines in the US, Asia, Latin America and Europe. When a user requests a service, I want their request to go to the server closest to them.
Is it possible for me to have one address: mycompany.com, and somehow get requests routed to the appropriate server? Apparently when someone goes to cnn.com, they receive the pictures, videos, etc. from a server close to them. Frankly, I don't see how that works.
By the way, my servers don't serve web pages, they serve other services such as stock market data....just in case that is relevant.
Since I'm a programmer, I'm interested to know how one would do it in software. Since this is little more than an idle curiosity, pointers to commercial products or services won't be very helpful in understanding this problem :)
One simple approach would be to look at the first byte (Class A) of the IP address coming into the UDP DNS request and then based off that you could deliver the right geo-located IP.
Another approach would be a little more complicated. Instead of using the server that is geographically closest to the user, you could use the server that has the lowest latency for that user.
The lower latency will provide faster transfer speeds while being easier to calculate than geographic location.
For a much more detailed look, check out this article on CDNs (pay attention to the Technology Section):
Content Delivery Network - Wikipedia
These are the kinds of networks that the large sites use to distribute their content over the net (Akamai is a popular example). As you can see, things can get pretty complicated pretty quickly with CDNs having their own proprietary protocols, etc...
Update: I didn't see the disclaimer about commercial solutions at the end of the original post. I'll leave this up for those who may find it of interest.
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Take a look at http://ultradns.com/. A managed DNS service like that may be just what you need to accomplish what you are looking for.
Amazon.com, Forbes.com, Oracle, all use them...
Quote From http://ultradns.com/solutions/traffic.html:
UltraDNS Traffic Management solution provides a set of tools allowing IT administrators to define load balancing configurations for content servers residing in one or more geographic locations. The Traffic Management Solution manages traffic directed to the servers by dynamically changing the responses to DNS requests. Load balancing is performed based on dynamic metrics obtained from the host servers on a continual monitoring basis. The UltraDNS Traffic Management solution is not a single application, but combines the capabilities of several existing UltraDNS systems to control traffic, manage site failures, and optimize web content systems.
One approach is, as Jeff mentioned, using the IP address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolocation_software
In my experienced, this is precise to the nearest relatively large city (in the US at least). There are several open databases to aid in this (see the wiki link). Then you can generate image tags and download links and such based on this information.
As for locating the nearest server, I'm sure you can think of a few ways to do it. For instance, if the best return you can get is major city, you can lookup that city in a list of Latitude/Longitude and calculate the nearest server based on that.
I am interested to know how the DNS requests to political sites differ in different countries.
I need to know how I can send a DNS query to a remote computer, let say, in China. Then, I want to compare the results to US. The goal of the experiment is to get a hand-on experience on the concept about DNS poison. I feel my lectures so theoretical.
How can you compare DNS requests between China and US, such that I can investigate DNS poisoning?
This depends a bit on how the queries are being altered. If the server is giving different results based on your locality, then asking it directly will not be of any use. If you're queries are being poisoned by a caching server in between, these methods might help.
If you have shell accounts in different parts of the world you can perform a simple test.
I'm using 'dig', which is available on most *nix systems. If you're running Windows you might want to search for an alternative in this list of DNS tools
To find the responsible DNS servers
dig ns domain-in-question.com #the.dns.server.you.want.to.use
To get the IP addres for the hostname
dig a host.domain-in-question.com #the.dns.server.you.want.to.use
(You can skip the #.. part to run with your current server)
I recommend trying both of these from different parts of the world to see if the server itself is giving different results or if the caching servers on the way there are being poisoned.
Also, searching for 'how to poison dns' gave me a number of practical results.
You can just use nslookup (the server command lets you specify the DNS server to ask)
Try this web tool:
http://www.kloth.net/services/dig.php
As for learning about DNS poisoning, every computer has settings for which DNS server to trust, and so on. If one of them in a chain is compromised, every computer downstream will receive bad information.
If the remote servers are correctly configured, they won't let you interrogate them.
Any recursive resolver should be configured to only provide answers to the clients its intended to serve.