IP address - who and why ?

[fabiuz]

Hallo,

I would like to filter IP address so that I can verify polls on my website.

During my tests, I get that:

some users are browsing my website using invalid IP address like 10.0.0.1 or 127.0.0.1 and similar

Some others seems to have any numeric IP "unknow"

so, first question is how could be that somebody is not using regular IP addresses ?

The second question is:

is it possible to know which Internet provider is the owner of the IP address ? Coulg I know wich range of ip address is related to a Internet service provider ?

I would like to detect IP address and understand:

• from which country the user is connected

• if he is a diul up user or a ADSL user

so that I can be able to better optimize my pages

Could anybody tell me something about ?

Thankyou very much

[dalecosp]

Hmm, what you get as a user's IP is questionable, no matter how you do it. How are you "discovering" the remote address?

As for whom, a reverse lookup is possible. For example, 'whois' in UNIX:

#whois 64.232.12.132
New Edge Networks NEN-AW5 (NET-64-232-0-0-1)
64.232.0.0 - 64.232.255.255
TATAK PILIPINO ATWORK-42457-32577 (NET-64-232-12-0-1)
64.232.12.0 - 64.232.12.255

and 'host', returning a in-addr.arpa (reverse DNS) pointer ...

#host 64.232.12.132
132.12.232.64.IN-ADDR.ARPA domain name pointer 132.12.232.64.transedge.com

But there's no guarantee that either of these will give you much information to work with, or that they're going to return any information at all (though that is rare). At other times there are some great clues; for example, that last address is probably in the domain "transedge.com". Sometimes you see "cable, dsl, adsl, cdm, dialup, dial" etc that may give you a clue as to the connection media.

IIRC, Apache can do name lookups in its logs, if you enable the option in your httpd.conf file ....

[suntra]

This may be useful : http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/

Little note: I'm not sure it's a good idea to check if someone voted or not by looking at his/her IP address... just think of some people working at the same place... they aren't the same person, but they use the same IP...

[webdes03]

People on home or corporate networks will all return the same IP, and remember that some users, ex: dialup users use dynamic IP's not static IP's.... so every time they login to your site their IP could be different. I think if I was you I'd come up with another way to verify your users. Have them create an account and verify your polls by their user ID or something. IP probably isn't the best way to go about this.

Getting the user's browser is simple enough. It's contained in the HTTP Headers which can be found a couple ways... one way is the phpinfo() function. More information here