How to Obtain Geolocation Information In Fedora

What is Fedora?

Fedora is an open-source Linux-based operating system. It is a Linux distribution developed by the community-supported Fedora Project. Fedora Project is responsible for the coordination of Fedora Linux. Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM, sponsors the Fedora Project. Initially released in 2003, Fedora has gained quite a fame as it provides help in creating innovative and open-source platforms which are free. Moreover, It helps to create platforms for hardware, clouds, and containers. This open-source operating system developed based on the Linux OS Kernel architecture provides virus protection, system tools, media playback, office productivity services, and various other desktop applications.

Advantages of Using Fedora

Fedora operating system provides the opportunity to have control over all the infrastructure and services. It is a very flexible and powerful operating system that provides the following advantages:

• It is considered an extremely reliable and stable operating system.
• The operating system has an enhanced security system.
• Fedora also provides useful graphical tools for better visualization.
• There is no need to update the operating system manually. It updates itself automatically.
• This operating system supports numerous file formats.
• Fedora also offers support for various educational software.
• Fedora provides its users with innovative security features and supports a large community of developers.

What is Geolocation?

Geolocation is a form of technology that takes help from the data gathered from a person’s device such as a computer or mobile phone and identifies the user’s actual location after analyzing the obtained data. There can be two types of data acquired by using Geolocation. One type is known as the active user or active device-based information. The other type of data is the server-based lookup or the data correlation. These are cross-referenced with each other to gather the optimal information and output the most accurate data. If the device has an active internet connection, the users can use Geolocation to obtain information in real-time, which helps to provide the user’s physical location. This technology is the foundation of location positioning services and location-aware applications.

Advantages of Using Geolocation

Geolocation technology helps maintain any type of business—for example, retail, financial services, enterprise manufacturing, insurance, utilities, transportation, and government. There are numerous commercial benefits of using Geolocation technology for providers and consumers alike. Some of the advantages of using Geolocation for business purposes are following:

• It helps in targeted advertising for the organization.
• Geolocation is helpful for the services like Delivery and Asset Management. It helps in the runtime tracking of location and status.
• This technology helps in the development of applications and sites which involve augmented reality.
• Geolocation information is essential in the development of the system for autonomous vehicles. It is essential to develop it using the information about its whereabouts to operate the vehicle without any human intervention.
• Having the information about the physical location of devices helps load balancing on the servers in case of heavy traffic.
• Geolocation technology helps in the detection of any occurrence of fraudulent activity. It prevents using internet protocol location along with fraud profile data.
• This technology helps in the real-time management of incidents and maintains transparent logs and other necessary IT data.

Geolocation Information in Fedora

Fedora supports the standard traceroute command used in Linux to find the location of a device. This traceroute command in Linux outputs the path a packet follows to reach the host device. This standard traceroute command comes in handy to get the information about the route and the hops a packet follows. Following is an example of a traceroute command directed towards the host, which is Google here in this case:

traceroute google.com

The above command provides the information about the hops packet visits to reach the host IP address. The complete information consists of the IP address of each visited hop and the time taken by the packet to reach each hop. Since the traceroute command sends three packets to the hop, each time refers to a packet to reach this hop.

IP2Trace Application

IP2Trace Application is one of the open-source command-line applications. It performs traceroute with geolocation information to identify traceroute probes in the IP address. The users use it to know more about each hop’s geolocation information existing inside the trace. IP2Trace is known as a tool that allows giving detailed information about the user’s location. This detailed information includes data such as the country, region, city, latitude, longitude, ZIP code, time zone, ISP, domain name, connection type, area code, weather, mobile network, elevation, and usage type from traceroute probes IP address. Usually, the type of data returned by the IP2Trace Application depends on the IP2Location BIN data that the user utilizes to perform the lookup.

Installation of IP2Trace Package

Following is the method to download and install the complete IP2Trace package in Fedora:

1. First, there is a need to install the IP2Location development headers and libraries. The users can do it by copying the following command in their terminal. The sudo keyword allows the users to run the command with administrator access to give security privileges.

sudo dnf install IP2Location-devel

2. The next step is to sign up for the free IP2Location LITE account. It will provide the user with a download token.
3. After getting the download token, the further step is to download the IP2Location BIN database. The users can use the following command to achieve this goal:

wget -O ip2location.zip “https://www.ip2location.com/download?token={DOWNLOAD_TOKEN}&package=DB3LITEBIN

Download DB3BIN

Moreover, it is helpful to download the DB3BIN that helps the user by providing information regarding country, region, and city. Following are the steps to download and use it:

1. The first step is to unzip the already downloaded ip2location package. Following is the command used for this purpose:

Unzip ip2location.zip

2. After this, the next step is to download the IP2Trace source from the existing project at its GitHub repository by using the following command:

wget https://github.com/ip2location/ip2locatopntraceroute/archive/master.zip

3. Then the next step is to unzip the downloaded IP2Trace package by the following command:

unzip master.zip && cd ip2location-traceroute-master

4. Next step is to compile IP2Trace from the source code by using the following code:

sudo make && sudo make install

5. Final step is to start using this IP2Trace by trace-routing the IP address 8.8.8.8. Following is an example command to use this:

sudo ip2trace -d ../IP2LOCATION-LITE-DB3.BIN-p 8.8.8.8

The above command will give information about the IP2Location Geolocation Traceroute and the copyright’s information along with the hop’s address and the critical informative data about the country, region, zip code, and time zone.