Location 'Unknown' Servers

randvegeta

Anyone interested in a server where the location could not be positively confirmed?

Server location can normally be estimated based on a number of factors, such as routes used, latency, and of course the GEO IP location.

But what if the location was obscured by means of abnormal / non-traditional routing?

For example, imagine you have a server in the UK but your IPs that are in use are not directly advertised at that location. Instead the IPs are advertised at pops on the west coast of the US and far east Russia (I use these examples due to the latency between all these locations being roughly 200ms). Then imagine that the outbound traffic of the server is sent directly from the UK data centre. For the most part, if you are located in the northern hemisphere, latency would almost always appear to be 200ms, no matter how far or close you are to the actual server.

Always seeing a latency of 200ms or so, regardless of your location, one may not be able to identify or even approximate the physical location of the server.

Is this useful for anyone?

Traffic

For legal purposes, maybe.

chip

Possibly for some people

theroyalstudent

Sounds like a fun thing to do.

randvegeta

theroyalstudent said: Sounds like a fun thing to do.

I have been doing some testing with this kind of routing setup, and actually still get very decent performance in terms of throughput. So without taking any significant hit on data transfer rates, it seemed to me, to be quite interesting. But I have yet to think of many practical use for increasing the latency other than perhaps to obscure the actual physical location. But why would that be useful? I'm not sure yet

doughmanes

I could use this with some projects in the interest of anonymity and free speech

Nooblette

Would be beneficial yes.

Jonchun

Always seeing a latency of 200ms or so, regardless of your location

Have you considered CC buffalo?

Ole_Juul

randvegeta said: imagine you have a server in the UK but your IPs that are in use are not directly advertised at that location.

I have two Ramnode VPSs, one in NY and one in LA. But both IPs are advertised as being in Georgia. A couple of thousand miles off in one direction, and a thousand in the other.