Where is an IP from?

[bob323]

Anyone know how to tell where an IP originates from geographically ie. city or country whatever..

[Slow_Learner]

There isn't a guaranteed-accurate way to know this without administrative access to every router in the world - obviously no single person has such access so no one can tell you for sure. Most times you can get a rough idea, as most Internet backbone carriers name their legs geographically; look at the OS command-line tool TRACERT. Here's a sample output for tracert www.vbforums.com:

C:\Documents and Settings\pjz.LIAR\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects>tracert w
ww.vbforums.com

Tracing route to www.vbforums.com [209.123.85.27]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
(stuff deleted...)
 13   204 ms   203 ms   218 ms  gar1-p3100.nwrnj.ip.att.net [12.123.214.181]
 14   219 ms   219 ms   203 ms  12.119.140.30
 15   219 ms   219 ms   203 ms  at-0-0-1-1152.gbr1.oct.nac.net [209.123.11.125]

 16   390 ms   219 ms   313 ms  g1-1.msfc1.oct.nac.net [64.21.102.2]
 17   203 ms   235 ms   219 ms  209.123.85.27

Trace complete.

... so my guess would be that the machine www.vbforums.com resolves to (209.123.85.27) resides in Newark, New Jersey (based on gar1-p3100.nwrnj.ip.att.net being one of the last hops on the route there) - BUT! there's no way to know for sure, 12.119.140.30 could be a pricate-owned link leading to some oil rig or anything else.

You may also want to look into various Whois Internet servers, which can sometimes (but not always!) give you more information about who owns a given block of IP addresses or a domain name. InterNIC.net's Whois server is probably the ideal one to use (they originally did *all* domain name registration). You will often find that the information on a given domain name is incomplete or incorrect (for example vbforums.com's registration information appears to point to Network Solutions, Inc as the owner). Hope this helps.