Testing localization

Question

We have a site which is using the ip of the client machine to determine location for display on the home page

Has anyone got any idea how we test this from a fixed office, on a corporate network?

Answer 1

Ideally I'd want dev to set a different private subnet to each supported location then change the private IP of the test computer for each location to test when creating the product. If necessary this could be enabled or disable in a config file (have a qa/production config option similar to debug).

This would allow you to setup static IP pools on your local router for each location and switch your IP as needed.

If this is not possible I'd look into IP address spoofing (the IP packet header is modified to make the HTTP request appear as if it came from a different source).

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If the testing is not being done locally then I'd use a proxy.

Answer 2

I would take a look at scapy which is a python library that allows you to construct packets that lie about the originating IP address, (and much more).