Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 May 10

= May 10 =

IP tracing
I just used three different IP tracing websites and they each suggested a completely different location (Manchester, Sheringham, and Wolverhampton), none of which is my home town. Is this normal?--Shantavira|feed me 16:53, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
 * IP geolocation is rarely very reliable - for the UK, particularly so. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 17:37, 10 May 2020 (UTC)


 * I have noticed the same thing regarding Southern California. Could it be that areas with many ISPs, some of which end up being bought by other ISPs, are especially likely to have inaccurate geolocation?
 * Geolocation does have its uses; when two IPs are on completely different continents they are less likely to be the same person. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:25, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is normal.
 * There is no standard, protocol, or database that is used by everyone to correlate an IP address (or network) with a physical location. Therefore there are multiple such databases in use, with different amounts of sharing of data, updating as things change, etc.
 * In one way, that's the beauty of the Internet Protcol. It is purely a virtual topology that does not have to reflect the physical characteristics that underly it.
 * Do some architects look back with chagrin, wishing they'd built-in geotagging to IPv6 at least? Perhaps. But there are many features of Internet Protocol that are barely implemented or utilized, so who's to say that a built-in geotagging wouldn't also suffer from lack of updates? Elizium23 (talk) 06:35, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
 * You probably have a dynamic IP shared over a wide geographical area, and the best they can do is pick one city from that area. Worse still if the IP blocks were swapped between ISPs. Think of it as a privacy and security benefit. 93.136.73.59 (talk) 00:28, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

read only
On ubuntu I am trying to copy and paste files onto an hdd via usb ports, I get an error saying "the hdd is read only" how do I change permissions? -- Thegooduser  Life Begins With a Smile :)  🍁 22:07, 10 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Is the disk mounted, and you are trying to copy onto the mounted filesystem? If so, perhaps the disk is mounted read-only. Run "mount" from a shell, find your disk and see if it is marked "ro". If that's the case, you should be able remount it read-write by "sudo mount -o remount,rw DEV DIR" where DEV is the disk device and DIR is the mount point. This won't work if there is some kind of hardware write-protect switch that is causing it to be mounted readonly. CodeTalker (talk) 16:09, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
 * CodeTalker the HDD has an oem windows 10 in which i never use, i only use it to store files, if I format the hdd will it do anything? -- Thegooduser  Life Begins With a Smile :)  🍁 16:04, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
 * That's hard to say without knowing exactly what the problem is. My bet would be no, it won't help. It would be pretty odd for the disk to be formatted in a way that makes it read-only. (That could happen, for example, if someone copied a raw iso image onto a disk partition, but why would someone do that?) Did you try to remount the disk as I described above? CodeTalker (talk) 16:39, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
 * CodeTalker, yes, did not work, I want to wipe the hdd as that might be the only choice... -- Thegooduser  Life Begins With a Smile :)  🍁 18:44, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Run gsmartcontrol to check if your disk has recorded many I/O errors or pending sectors. If not, best run an extended SMART test. You might first have to do  or whatever is the package name in Ubuntu. Mysterious read-only errors can happen when the drive is failing. If the drive is failing, you'll probably want to use ddrescue to recover any important data before it's completely dead, and also dig up your warranty slip. 93.142.75.127 (talk) 20:42, 14 May 2020 (UTC)