我怎么知道数据库的实际地理位置？

Question

I am tasked to get the location where our SQL Server database is geographically located via C# code because it may vary time to time due to frequent relocation of our database to protect it from physical and cyber harm. Is this possible or another dream of my boss thanks in advance.

Answer 1

1 - Buy somethihng like this. It's a UPS GPS receiver.

2 - Connect it to the server machine.

3 - Write a batch or shell script that will call the GPS software and return the current position.

4 - Use xp_cmdshell to call this script and return the current position via SQL Server query.

Answer 2

Buy an iPhone/Android phone and have it sellotaped to the top of the machine that has the database on it. Write a quick app to have it look at the GPS API and post it's position to the database the phone is connected on using some kind of JSON/SOAP API over HTTPS (for security purposes).

You can then access the GPS information from where you are using C#.

Edit

Working with the GPS on Mono/iPhone: http://drdobbs.com/mobility/222600599

Example code, GPS on Mono/Android: https://github.com/gshackles/Sample-Projects/blob/master/MonoDroid/MonoDroidSamples/MonoDroidSamples/DemoActivities/LocationDemo/LocationActivity.cs

Answer 3

The simplest solution is to do a DNS lookup, then use an IP location service as Cody suggested. Try this:

var foo = Dns.GetHostEntry("database.windows.net");

Once you've got your IP address, you'll need to load something like http://www.iplocationfinder.com/65.55.23.107 using an HttpWebRequest, unless you want to pay for an IP location database. Once you've got the response to the HttpWebRequest, you can use a regular expression to parse the location name, or latitude and longitude if you need that instead.

Answer 4

Do you have so many servers which are moved around overnight in your company or is this for a cloud db setup? the IP address is probably a basic inaccurate-better than nothing starting point.

Answer 5

As Davide Piras mentioned you can use for example this site : http://ip-lookup.net/ to trace the IP Address of you're DB Server and you can grab the Output maybe using Regular Expresion's or http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/ .

Bu that works only if you can get you're DB Server IP Address ,which i think shouldn't be an Issue because you need the IP for the Connection String .

To achieve that use a WebBrowser Control ,do webbrowser1.navigate("http://ip-lookup.net/"); than :

HtmlElementCollection elc = this.webBrowser1.Document.GetElementsByTagName("input");
            foreach (HtmlElement el in elc)
            {
                if (el.GetAttribute("type").Equals("text") && el.GetAttribute("name").Equals("ip"))
                {
                    el.InnerText = "Server IP";
                }
            }

next :

HtmlElement form = webBrowser1.Document.GetElementById("form_single_IP");
            if (form != null)
                form.InvokeMember("submit");
             //Submit the form

and try to filter the output because im not very good using Regex .You can capture the Output by using webbrowser1.DocumentText;

Answer 6

Why not use the database to tell you the location? To clarify what I mean:

Using SQL CLR Stored Procedure To Track IP Address - but make the CLR sproc return the ipaddress of the server its hosted on.

I saw the azure connection string you mentioned to Cody and thought these would be a handy links: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/07/06/windows-azure-deployments-and-the-virtual-ip-address.aspx

Get Azure public IP address from deployed app

Answer 7

Determining the time zone is probably the best you can do from SQL Server, but that could be enough for you based on your description. You can use this query to get the GMT offset of the time zone where the server is located:

SELECT DATEDIFF(hh, GETUTCDATE(), GETDATE()) AS ServerTimeZone

From this result, you can easily add some logic to return the time zone abbreviation, ie EST , CST , etc. I know this isn't much, but hopefully it helps.

Answer 8

If someone already physically moves the server, why not write some script that writes the corresponding location to DB? When the machine starts up, auto-start that tool and have the "mover" select a location.