My Mac Thinks I am in Overland, Kansas

My Mac thinks my physical location is Overland, KS. Overland is 906 miles from where I live. This just started about a month ago. I can find no way to reset my real physical location. What to do? Thanks!!

There's not a lot you can do since your Mac's location is being determined by your IP address given by your ISP.

To confirm that you are seeing something actually goofy, visit http://geomena.org/ and click on the Looking up your location link and see where it thinks you are based on the address. In my case, I just ran the test and it got the street, city and state correct but the house number was the neighbor as opposed to me. But I'll forgive that much..

Raz0rEdge: Thanks, went there, did that, like you almost perfect, couple of house numbers off, but city and state are perfect. I it nuts to not be able to get this straight, in Dashboard the Weather Channel knows where I am.

Where did you see the fact that your Mac was being reported being elsewhere?

I've had this problem happen to me (when your IP address is reported as being hundreds of miles from your actual location). And when I searched the internet for solutions…nothing was really helpful.

In my case my IP address (IP lookup) was actually reporting me as being in 4 different places (one of these was my actual location…the three others were as far away as 600 miles away). I will add that at the time I had this problem I had recently relocated…and one of the erroneous locations was my previous home location hundreds of miles away. So maybe something in my setup was causing this…but that didn't explain the other two erroneous locations.

This actually lead me to have a serious problem…since I was not able to conduct any business (buy/sell on Craig's List)…or even be able to view my local Craig's List. Craig's List watches for this sort of stuff…and lock's you out.

I tried running Disk Utility, running Onyx, Malwarebytes, etc….and nothing helped. Long story…the only thing that helped was a "nuke & pave" of my computers hard drive. Then a fresh install of the OS and apps.

A real pain in the butt…but everything has been fine since (knock on wood)! I REALLY needed access to Craig's List…so it had to be done.

- Nick

p.s. Wanted to mention that certain webpages like weather.com & other webpages that tailor things based on your location also had my location wrong.

Howdy guys, thanks for responses. Question: 'How do I know that it thinks I am in Overland, KS?' I use MSN as my home page and the little weather widget there shows me in Overland, KS, also WeatherUnderground thinks I am in Overland, KS. Do not have the Craig's list problem, in fact in Dashboard, the Weather Channel widget thingy knows where I am. I am confused. I am sorry, do not have the wherewithal to 'nuke' my drive, way too timid for that.

MarkA70 said:

Raz0rEdge: Thanks, went there, did that, like you almost perfect, couple of house numbers off, but city and state are perfect. I it nuts to not be able to get this straight, in Dashboard the Weather Channel knows where I am.

Click to expand...

OMG it knows my house!!! Waving...

MarkA70 said:

Do not have the Craig's list problem...

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Was only sharing an experience.

In case you haven't done it…go to this IP Address lookup site:

http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup

Once there…click the "Lookup IP Address" button…then scroll down & see what the location results are. Are the results correct or not?

- Nick

badshoehabit said:

OMG it knows my house!!! Waving...

Click to expand...

The Internet knows all..