4 ms·
What's going on in Kansas?
by Thriptic 11y ago
What's going on in Kansas?
- anc84 11y agoGeolocating IP addresses is very flawed and making maps from such data is bad science.
- chatmasta 11y agoKansas has some big data centers in it (there's a reason google fiber launched there). Lots of dedicated server and colocation providers are located in Kansas City. In order for these providers to receive IP addresses from ARIN, they must register with ARIN as an "autonomous system" (AS). One of the items on the form they must complete is the geolocation of the IP address block they are being assigned. That geolocation is often the location of the provider company, not necessarily the location of the server(s) the IP(s) point to. Server providers register as autonomous systems, and purchase IP space in large blocks. They often have servers at multiple data centers, with VLAN routing configured to switch packets at the ingress IP to whichever server that IP is assigned to. When a client rents a server from a provider, the provider assigns the client some number of IP addresses from its available pool. Many times, the provider does not actually SWIP (officially delegate via ARIN) these IP addresses to the client, so the registration with ARIN will not reflect the owner of the server an IP currently points to. tl;dr When a packet goes to an IP belonging to an AS registered with a certain geolocation, the AS can switch that packet to wherever it wants.
- finnn 11y agoWhile the other commenters may be correct and seem to know more about this than I, almost every time I've seen stuff geolocate to "Kansas" it's geolocating to the United States, with no further level of detail available. The mapping software finds the geographic center of the United States (which is somewhere in Kansas) and puts it there