I’m still getting IP addresses from SFC-ATL that show Vultr Holdings in Germany, from whatismyipaddress.com and whatismyip.com.
isc.sans.edu does recognize it as US at least.
Regardless of why it is reporting that way, obviously other websites see the IP addresses as Germany because I’m getting geoblocked by many sites. Especially commerce and streaming. Also, the IP address I’m assigned specifically is on at least 2 blacklists, which can cause problems with sites that subscribe to those blacklists.
What is the point of SFC and choosing a location if it doesn’t appear we’re coming from that location to everyone?
Essentially, yes, sometimes geolocations are wrong, and VPNs are often blocked (even though SFC isn’t really a VPN) and support suggested adding specific rules for URLs that are blocked to bypass SFC.
Just to add data, when I manually verify my ip address in whatismyip.com, it shows that IP2Location.com lists the IP address in Germany, while ipdata.co shows it in Atlanta.
By using SFC you are tunnelling your traffic via another location, that is quite literally the very definition of what a VPN does.
It is no secret what cloud providers Peplink uses to host most of the SFC infrastructure in (Vultr is just one of them), it is also pretty well known that a lot of these providers address space is often blocked by geolocked services regardless of the location the IP address resolves to.
Streaming sites in particular are becoming more aggressive at enforcing these kinds of blocks, its likely you’d have problems no matter where the SFC endpoint was with services such as Netflix and Amazon Video etc.
They use IP2Location (https://www.ip2location.com/) who are one of the bigger providers of these kinds of services.
Some others to try if you wanted a few to compare would be the obvious ones like Maxmind, DB-IP, DigitalElement and IP-Info - as far as I am aware those providers have their own databases, and are not just selling a service that makes use of another providers database.
That is probably a little more concerning, depending on what block list it has ended up on. That said, Vultr are a pretty inexpensive hosting provider and as a result their services are often abused and addresses can end up on those lists for quite a long time. Though frankly out of that list that sites claims to check against the only ones I would really give much credence to is the abuse.ch list and possibly spamhaus. Again, possibly something for Peplink to ask Vultr to resolve though as they are unlikely to get much done approaching the list maintainers themselves (and again, a lot of those lists like Geo IP services tend to be amalgamations of many other lists).
As for fixing this… just use another SFC location?
Maybe Peplink could move your device onto a different SFC node at Atlanta if that is not viable? (Not sure how they actually determine which node you land on in a given region).
Getting the Geo IP info updated is probably not something you can do easily, whilst most of those providers do have ways to report incorrectly located IP addresses but they tend to only action those reports if they are coming from someone who is actually responsible for the IP space concerned - in this instance, Vultr - so perhaps Peplink could ask Vultr to try and fix the problem.
Not sure why someone bothered blocking out the IP address either, not like they are a big secret but pretty sure from looking at that covering /17 it has been well established in the US as assigned by ARIN for a very long time, so somewhat interesting that some specific prefix from it has appeared in a RIPE region.
