[vn-tech] help with IP Locators

[Tin Le]

Ah, ok.  I see.  You are looking for where the IP is located physically.
As I said before, that may not be possible.  You've already found that you
get different answers depending on which one of the web services you used.

These services can only give you approximate location.  IP addresses are
given out (assigned) in blocks by the appropriate Regional Internet Registry.
In North America, that's ARIN.  The problem is that say, a company based in
US get a block (such as Cisco get 171.71.x.x B class for internal use).

Well, Cisco has offices all over the world and so the location of an
IP within Cisco's owned block will only tell you it's from inside Cisco
but not where in the world it is.

Yes, I've used these "IP Locator" services before and thought they were
somewhat useless.  It's better to just use the basic network tools that
has existed since IP was invented - ping, traceroute, arp, nslookup...

Cheers,
Tin Le
-- 
http://tin.le.org
Tin Le - tin at le.org
Firewall and Security Consulting

> Hi Anh Tin and All:
> Sorry for not having been explicit enough in my presentation.
> I was curious about the origin of strange e-mails sent to me and afraid to miss the important ones before deciding to delete my bulk mail. To trace back these unidentified e-mails the only information available, is its IP addresses, which I can visualize by clicking, depending on the type of e-mail, on Properties, Source or Headers etc..
> To determine the approximate geographic location of such revealed IP addresses, many Software called IP Locators are offered either Free or with a limited trial version. Two examples of it are as follow:
>  
> 1.    http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm
>  
> 2.    http://ip2location.com/free.asp
>  
> These IP Locators generally let you know the geographic location of the IP addresses that are submitted to them but sometimes give you erroneous results, and if you submit the same IP address to two different IP Locator Software, you will end up with totally different geographic locations, indicating that an accurate IP Locator should be searched for in order to obtain better results.
> Regards. P Tran.