PING ip address - location
Burns
2,227 Posts
How do I go about locating someone via email PING? Can it be done? If you get someones IP address, can their physical address be found from their IP?
Comments
Find a Users IP Address on AIM
Knowing someones IP address is actually pretty useless in this case, but most people don't realize that. If someone is harassing you via AIM and you can't get them to stop, discovering their IP and sending it to them--with a nicely worded threat of law enforcement involvement should they not stop--is likely enough to send them scamping away with tail between legs.
http://www.elitehackers.info/forums/archive/index.php/t-2827.html
Their IP address is just a unique number on the internet to identify their PC (well, their network card). It is what is used to route the traffic to your PC. The actual IP addresses your PC uses to route data from A to B will vary depending on how your PC is firewalled, routed and networked.
I would wager that unless that person has bought their own unique IP address from Internic and registered their own PC with a name known to all DNS servers all over the internet, they will have an address that corresponds to kit belonging to their company routers or ISP, not their own PC.
You could track down who (or more likely, what company) owns a given IP address like so:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois/?ip=78.100.23.24&server=
But it's usually going to be a high-level IP address, not the name of a person on a PC. It will however give you the location of the business who owns the IP address - and if they are not a multinational then you have a good idea of geography, depending on your definition of good.
IP addresses can be spoofed easily and they can change frequently. If they person hops on the wifi at Starbucks they'll have a different IP. You could always traceroute to the IP address that you have to get a general idea of where it is coming from (which city), but if they are spoofing the address it is likely they are pointing you in the wrong direction. Finding an exact location isn't that simple really. An ISP like Time Warner Roadrunner will have thousand upon thousands of physical locations throughout a city.
Here is geo-locator that you can use to find out what city the IP is in.
http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?Getlocation
Another way to find a physical address is if they have a registered domain name. If they registered the domain and didn't pay extra to have the registration name and address set to private you can run a WHOIS and see the physical address registered for that domain.