I.P addreses, what do they tell us?

Jan 29, 2006

Just out of interest (and beacuse I'm a nosey old cow!

)

Can you find out who is visiting your site, if you have the IP address?

I have someone who has looked at my site every day practically for the last 60 days! and I'm curious to find out who they are.

Is it possible to get this info from an IP address?

Coding Monkey · Jan 29, 2006

Easy answer: no.

You can find out their ISP, their location and that's about it.

Rob Holmes · Jan 29, 2006

Hi Claire,

Copy and paste the following line into a browser window and add the IP address after the = and it will give you some info

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=

Hope this helps,

Rob

crus · Jan 29, 2006

OK,

pretty much whats been said above, although, the followinfg needs to be added.

1. An ip address can be purchased and owned by an individual entity not just ISP's. This can then identify the company. Doubt it in this case but possible and will be reported in the tools link you were given by Rob.

2. If, for legal reasons an ip address needs to be converted to an ISP's user, then this CAN be done as long as an exact time for usage of the ip address is know. Most of the time this is possible and is regularly used to identify criminal usage of the ISP's network. Again, I think this is not relevent as I think its just a case that you want to find out who this is accessing the site.

3. If you are really nosey, you can find out a lot about that specific user if you really want to by instantly analysing key data by triggering an application or block of code when access is made from that IP. This kind of passive-active sniffing can yield an email address of the user which can identify that person. I have used this technique to monitor access to a website where content was being ripped by a user and then posted anonymously on a forum without credit.

D

D

D

JustOneUK · Jan 29, 2006

Claire B said:
Just out of interest (and beacuse I'm a nosey old cow! )

I have someone who has looked at my site every day practically for the last 60 days! and I'm curious to find out who they are.

could possibly be a remote bot..like google bot.

seabro · Jan 29, 2006

On one or two of my sites, I have a script which emails me

remote ip address, remote host name, time of visit, referrer

Sometimes the remote hosts says googlebot and sometimes it has a version of the name of a company. I acquired one of my better customers by telephoning them while they were surfing my site and the relationship has been going strong ever since.

It's good because I can see when customers are referred from yell.com or google or msn or this site and in the case of search engines, you can see what search terms where used.

Of course, the other thing you could do with an IP of you didnt mind breaking the law was port scan them and possibly gain access to their PC. Quite rare for it to work but it certainly is possible.

**BEGIN EDIT**
For example, I just received the following which tells me someone on the NTL service, in the midlands area(?) accessed my site from my link in this very post.

midd-cache-1.server.ntli.net
62.254.64.12
visited Cardiff IT Support from http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/ftopic9224.php

**END EDIT**

Ian J · Jan 29, 2006

Claire B said:
I have someone who has looked at my site every day practically for the last 60 days! and I'm curious to find out who they are.

It's either a bot, a competitor or perhaps perhaps someone that you link to checking to see that the link is still there.

I use All Net Tools to see who's visiting my site

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I.P addreses, what do they tell us?

Coding Monkey

Rob Holmes

crus

JustOneUK

seabro

Ian J

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