Re: Apple Geolocation contact?

[Riley O via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

Greetings from up the mountain (Lee Hill),

I've been fighting a similar issue. I'd like to throw in, a lot of mobile devices are geolocation dependent for time, 
and may completely disregard DHCP timezone and instead rely entirely on GeoLocation *even if it is woefully inaccurate, 
or unobtainable*.

The room being shielded from cellular and GPS, I would imagine removes the primary mechanism most devices use to locate 
themselves. In those cases, most devices won't fail back to normal timesetting standard practices, but instead just 
'send it' and set the time to some obscure default based on zeroed location or hardcoded internals.

Our issue at our house has been a total lack of cellular coverage and odd dynamics of GPS in a forest/valley leading to 
our mobiles falling back to obscure manufacturer default timezones when they reboot up here. If my cell phone goes 
dead, it will ignore the internal RTC on power up, and briefly show 00:00 before syncing with a timeserver and settings 
it's timezone to EST, regardless of what it was set to before or what DHCP says is correct. 


It's a real shame given our proximity to the NIST office. There are some really bright time folks over there, it might 
be worth your time to reach out to someone there. Surely someone at CU will know the right person :)

Thanks,
Riley C. O'Connor
ColoradoColo - AS17139
307.438.9253 - m32 () cubit sh


On Wednesday, August 28th, 2024 at 5:40 PM, J.R. Raith <raithjr () jila colorado edu> wrote:

>

>

> Hi All,

> I have a laboratory in my department which thinks it's in central Russia
> when using Apple Maps on macOS and iOS devices. (I've also seen it in
> Google Maps on macOS, which I assume is GMaps getting its location from
> the OS). The lab has also reported Bhutan, Malta, and the equally exotic
> Ohio. This room is a shielded from GPS and cellular signals, but may
> pick up neighboring Access Points. Step outside of that specific room
> and you're back in Colorado.

> Phones and laptops keep setting their timezone wildly wrong and we're
> having graduate students and faculty missing classes/meetings.

> I've tried swapping out the Access Point in the lab. I've tried dropping
> a pin in Apple Maps and reporting the location as incorrect, repeatedly
> and with separate devices.

> I started looking at geolocatemuch, but I'm not sure that's the problem
> in this instance. The NAT IP we come from shows proper location in
> infosniper.

> I'd love to chat with an Apple person about how to solve it.

> Wish I could get frequent flyer miles for this...

> Thanks,
> J.R. Raith
> _________________________________________________
> Network Administration & Desktop Support
> JILA Computing - University of Colorado, Boulder

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