Default Lat and Long Values in Servers

[Vulcan59]

Recently, I've been involved in setting up a forum and one of the things I noticed about all the servers that I've worked with is that when you run a phpinfo on them, the default latitude and longitude seems to fixed at lat of 31.7667 and long of 35.2333. Now the server can be physically anywhere in the world and yet the default lat and long seems to be the same for each of the servers that I've checked.

So next step was to find where that position is and surprisingly it turns out to be Jerusalem!! Wiki states that the original developer of PHP was Danish, but it was subsequently rewritten by two Israeli developers.

My question is, why would the server report it's position as in Jerusalem (via the default lat and long values) when the actual server is somewhere else? How about the SOTT servers? Do they have the same values? Can the default values be changed to reflect the correct physical position of the server?

Anyone here able to shed more light on this?

 

[MrGullible]

Hey Vulcan59,

Did a little searching for you (and me as I was curious)... It isn't the server hardware or OS that is reporting these coordinates. These defaults are hard coded into PHP itself. Apparently it can be changed in php.ini :

_http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_ref_date.asp

The servers / OS can't tell where they are (in specific) although it can be programatically determined in general by using GEOIP location services.

HTH

 

[Vulcan59]

Thanks Mr.Gullible,

I've seen that link that you've specified. Yes I was thinking along the same lines, ie that it was coded in the PHP and not the hardware or OS. I suppose most people when they configure the servers, don't bother to specify their lat and long positions and they just tend to leave it at default which is set to point at Jerusalem.

 

[dant]

The programmers have have done it this way in order to
pull a `negative energy' (STS) feed in their direction? ;)