Current Location is wrong, and has been for 2 years now.

psi-jack · 2024-02-24 17:05:40

I have this annoying problem, and I have no clue how to fix it. I have two computers, Desktop and Tabtop (Laptop/Tablet 360-flip). Both computers moved with me from Florida to Canada, same Eastern timezone, but different physical location by far.

Desktop 'current location' in gnome-clocks shows my old City/State. Vivaldi & Firefox googling weather for various cities/states around the world, Melbourne, Australia for example, shows Fahrenheit. Tabtop, on the other hand, shows Canada, Vivaldi/Firefox shows Celsius appropriately as well.

This has been an ongoing issue for over 2 years, and multiple system wipes as well. And I mean total system wipes as new installations. Fedora -> Debian -> MX Linux -> Endeavour OS -> Arch Linux, where we are now. So this issue is persisting under all situations.

Further testing done:
curl -s "https://location.services.mozilla.com/v … ey=geoclue" | jq -r '"\(.location.lat):\(.location.lng)"'

This results in a VERY accurate location result as matched up with Google Maps for the Longitude and Latitude coordinates. Literally down to the street address accurate.

Last edited by psi-jack (2024-02-24 17:26:02)

cryptearth · 2024-02-24 23:08:49

If this information somehow survived "full" system wipes it seems it's either stored in a way that's not updated - or you have it in some config in /home and have that dragged along.

Just for fun: Do you have experience with KVMs? If so, just set up a blank one and see if this persists. If so, it could be somewhere in the uefi (although I'm unsure if and how that could be possible - or any application aware of such and reading it from there). Otherwise, if the VM comes out clean, it's likely some config you kept and dragged along when moving between the distros.

Although I'm curious what setting that might be, likely some DE one, as all I have done on my system was the timezone set to Europe/Berlin to get Germany - although I don't live in Berlin.

As for the location service you linked - for me it's quite off - although it gets my city it's in a wrong part of it - although my private location should be known to the exact position as my IPv4 has a reverse PTR record which resolves back to my domain - from which you can get quite any information. And as my phone is also connected to wifi google knows the location of my router very precise - even without gps signal.

Last edited by cryptearth (2024-02-24 23:10:53)

seth · 2024-02-25 08:31:25

multiple system wipes as well

Did you preserve your $HOME?

Are the gnome location services (still) enabled?
https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help … on.html.en
The locale settings (metric system & celsius vs. the imperial madness) are generally independent of your location, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/locale & https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help … ge.html.en

psi-jack · 2024-02-25 18:36:44

I'm actually more suspecting this is in relation to MLS (Mozilla Location Services) as that's what geoclue uses by default to look up location as per WiFi. I've made a script to help try to resolve this based on https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/wifi-ne … es/81273/7 -- For both the 802.11n radio and 802.11ac radio with the main BSSID paired for abiding the 2xBSSID submission guide that was also mentioned.
So far, however, this isn't resolving anything, but this used to report my old lat/lon, but it's now falling back to IPF based resolution, However geoclue itself still reports the old lat/lon regardless.

psi-jack · 2024-02-25 18:45:23

seth wrote:

multiple system wipes as well
Did you preserve your $HOME?

For the most part, actually no. Documents, Downloads, Music, etc are usually linked to an HDD mounted drive, and configuration files are very specifically managed with yadm for dotfiles configuration, with dconf loading of specific configruation blocks to configure GNOME-specific keybindings, and very specifically chosen configuration, at most, nothing that would be specific to geoclue or location services.

seth wrote:

Are the gnome location services (still) enabled?
https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help … on.html.en
The locale settings (metric system & celsius vs. the imperial madness) are generally independent of your location, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/locale & https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help … ge.html.en

As if now I'm running Xfce, with gnome services enabled in session startup, but most of them are disabled. geoclue I believe is used for gnome location services, which I mentioned in my recent post, I feel it's most likely the base culprit of this, which I'm actively trying to resolve.

seth · 2024-02-25 21:04:34

As if now I'm running Xfce, with gnome services enabled in session startup

On both systems or only the malfunctioning one?
What does

/usr/lib/geoclue-2.0/demos/where-am-i

report and what does your geomclue config look like?
https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/geo … oclue.5.en

psi-jack · 2024-02-25 21:49:54

seth wrote:

As if now I'm running Xfce, with gnome services enabled in session startup
On both systems or only the malfunctioning one?

Actually in this case, both. The issue with Vivaldi/Firefox reporting the wrong temperature was actually a google account specific thing I found out. I was logged in on my desktop (in wrong unit), and correct on tabtop which was not logged in, specific to browsers.

seth wrote:

What does
/usr/lib/geoclue-2.0/demos/where-am-i
report and what does your geomclue config look like?
https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/geo … oclue.5.en

This is where the wrong info starts to come from:

From both computers, provided that WiFi is enabled, and yes my desktop has a WiFi adapter which is why this is failing, I'm getting from geoclue's where-am-i:

Client object: /org/freedesktop/GeoClue2/Client/1

New location:
Latitude: 29.xxxx°
Longitude: -82.xxxx°
Accuracy: 10.000000 meters
Description: WiFi
Timestamp: Sun 25 Feb 2024 04:44:32 PM (1708897472 seconds since the Epoch)

Now that's old information, by a long shot.

When I query the information directly from MLS I get different information depending on how I query it.

If I query with the WiFi AP's 802.11n MAC and Station MAC, I get current location, but it also shows it's falling back to IPF.
If I query with the WiFi AP's 802.11ac MAC and Station MAC, I get again, current location, still falling back to IPF
If, however, I query with the WiFi AP's 802.11n and 802.11ac MAC radios, I get the same Latitude and Longitude mentioned above that's down in Florida. I should easily be seeing a Latitude of 43, not 29, just as a rough example.

Arch Linux

#1 2024-02-24 17:05:40

Current Location is wrong, and has been for 2 years now.

#2 2024-02-24 23:08:49

Re: Current Location is wrong, and has been for 2 years now.

#3 2024-02-25 08:31:25

Re: Current Location is wrong, and has been for 2 years now.

#4 2024-02-25 18:36:44

Re: Current Location is wrong, and has been for 2 years now.

#5 2024-02-25 18:45:23

Re: Current Location is wrong, and has been for 2 years now.

#6 2024-02-25 21:04:34

Re: Current Location is wrong, and has been for 2 years now.

#7 2024-02-25 21:49:54

Re: Current Location is wrong, and has been for 2 years now.

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