Geolocation Testing

[Andy]

Hi guys,

I'm currently working on a project that determines the geographical
location of a request to our servers. I'm not sure exactly how it
works as the geolocation functionality is coming from a package that
we're integrating with our website. (The package actually does much
more than just give back geographical locations, but that's irrelevant)

Because of the nature of this project (this is for a financial
institution), we need to test out the package before we begin
integrating it to ensure that it's giving us the right data.

Now, it seems that the obvious course of action would be to find
willing employees who could "hit" the servers and then ensure that the
data is coming back correctly, but this presents a few problems:
- The sample size of the test will be limited to however many
participants we have.
- The majority of the participants reside in the same geographic area.
- The testing servers that this code would be sitting on are behind a
corporate intranet, and so IT would have to get involved to do some
routing magic.

So now the question: Do any of you know of any good software packages
or methods to spoof the location of an incoming request or have any of
you had to test something like this? Any hints on a workable approach?

Thanks and regards.
Andy

 

[Guest]

Andy,
You might want to look into the Virtual Earth "location.ashx" handler that
returns the coordinates of the browser making the request. You may have to
search around a bit to find this. I've got some info on this in an article I
wrote some time ago, here:

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20051109.asp

Peter

 

[Andy]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your response!
I don't know if we're on the same page though; basically getting
coordinates / locations isn't my issue, my issue is figuring out how to
spoof http requests to the current geolocation package that we have to
ensure that it's working correctly.

Ideally, this would be some sort of tool that allows me to say "OK, I
want you to access this server and request this page, and tell it
you're from Las Vegas, Nevada" or something to that effect. I would
then want to make sure that the geolocation package that we have says
"Hey, I just got a request from someone in Vegas", and then continue on
giving it different countries and whatnot.

 

[Guest]

Andy,
I understand exactly what you want / need to do. What you must understand is
that when your request comes in, the only piece of information available to
the server that could be used for geolocation is the originating IP address.
You can do a lookup against this in DNS and find out approximately where it
came from.

So how are you going to "spoof" your originating IP address?
Peter

--
Co-founder, Eggheadcafe.com developer portal:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com
UnBlog:
http://petesbloggerama.blogspot.com

 

[Andy]

Exactly, that's the question.

Well, let me ask you this, Peter: If I was to go out to some random
website, DNS it and get it's IP address, if I were to just send that
into this geolocation package sitting on a local machine, would it be
able to tell where it is originating from geographically? That is, are
IP addresses, though dynamically allocated, geographically fixed to
some extent?

Thanks again!
Andy

 

[Andy]

Nevermind Peter, that question was a result of too much coffee.

So you can't really spoof an IP address, but that is exactly what I
would need to do in order to be able to test this out as I wanted. So
I guess it'll just be a matter of sucking it up and trying to get some
geographically diverse employees to test this guy out.

Thanks again!
Andy

 

[Guest]

Yes, sir. That's it.
Peter
--
Co-founder, Eggheadcafe.com developer portal:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com
UnBlog:
http://petesbloggerama.blogspot.com