Automation URL gives different results in Perl

[kosinski1]

If I visit the automation URL (http://automation.whatismyip.com/n09230945.asp) in a browser like Safari, I get the correct IP address for my machine (always 70.231.xxx.yyy, where xxx and yyy can change based on DHCP).

If I visit it in a Perl script using HTTP::Request::Common, occasionally the IP address will come back as 205.248.102.82. Most of the time it works, but sometimes it returns this bogus IP. The Perl script identifies itself with a user-agent = 'libwww-perl/6.03'.

I have a hard time imagining that the automation URL cares what your user agent is, but I have no other explanation for this behavior. Anyone else seeing this? Any idea what's going on?

[wimiadmin]

hi kosinski1,

Thanks for letting us know. We've recently implemented CloudFlare to help us serve up pages faster. They're probably not liking your UserAgent and presenting a CAPTCHA which you can't see.

Try setting your UA to something common like:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0

Let me know how that works out.

[kosinski1]

Cool. I'll give that a try. Thanks!

[kosinski1]

Looks like you also added some code that now rejects requests from libwww-perl/6.03. I set the UA as you suggested and things seem to work. Since the problem is intermittent I'll need to monitor it for a while to make sure it's fixed, but if you don't hear from me again you can assume it's all good.

Thanks again!

[wimiadmin]

You're the second person to confirm the UA fix. So, this will probably be a permanent fix. But please monitor and let us know if something goes wrong.

[Sitron_NO]

I have the same problem using Python with urllib2:

ip = urllib2.urlopen("http://automation.whatismyip.com/n09230945.asp").read()

Since Telenor is my ISP, I know which IP-blocks I can expect, but I always get an IP from belonging Hotmail :-)

Copy-paste from Wireshark:

GET /n09230945.asp HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: identity
Host: automation.whatismyip.com
Connection: close
User-Agent: Python-urllib/2.6

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: cloudflare-nginx
Date: Thu, 03 May 2012 06:28:23 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
Cache-Control: private
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Set-Cookie: __cfduid=d0b909e53cd8a9f3851d018c2eb1fc87c1336026503; expires=Mon, 23-Dec-2019 23:50:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.whatismyip.com
Set-Cookie: __cfduid=d0b909e53cd8a9f3851d018c2eb1fc87c1336026503; expires=Mon, 23-Dec-2019 23:50:00 GMT; path=/; domain=.automation.whatismyip.com

c
65.52.66.156
0

Using Firefox, wget or Chrome gives me the correct address.

[wimiadmin]

Hi Sitron,

Try setting your UA to something common like:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0