Mapping IP address to country

Anon

Hi,

Working on a user logging script for websites, where I track the most hit pages, the reffer etc. I can get the users IP address by using $REMOTE_ADDR in PHP. Now how do I map this to the users country of origin? This would be helpful in knowing from which part of the workd my hits are comming from.

Regards,
Krishna.

[deleted]

Mapping IP to country is very difficult.
A better/easier solution would be to get the domain name from the DNS and look up the extension (.uk .es etc)
But domains like .com and .org can be anywhere.

Anon

OK, if not map an IP address to the country. Any other way in determinig from which countries my hits are comming from.

Krishna.

[deleted]

The only indication of country is in the ip number and the domain name, and that's not reliable.
Unless you can get your hands on a complete list of IP numbers and the countries they belong to....

An IP number can theoretically point everywhere, and a domainname can theoretically be registered everywhere. (most countries have rules about it though)

kparker

and a domainname can theoretically be registered everywhere

And further, just because it's registered in a particular country doesn't mean it's hosted there.

[deleted]

Very true!

Anon

This is not a reply, but more of a repeated question: Disregarding all the ifs and buts about reliability, does anyone have the list of which IP addresses has a connection to what country?

Anon

I too have been looking for the same thing all day. I am in Canada, you see, and I was denied access to a certain US site based on my IP... I want to know a complete table. So far I have only found a partial table, located here:
http://hal.chemistry.ohio-state.edu/Cis888/Au00/HuiYang/CIS888-doc/How%20to%20discover%20the%20country%20of%20an%20IP%20address.htm

[deleted]

So you want a list of which countries all of the 4228250625 IP adresses go to?
giggle

Anon

OR a way to calculate the country based on groups of IP addresses, for example... unless of course you have the full list.

"giggle"

Anon

but what is the break-up of an I.P. ? I am sure the 1st three digits correspond to country...203 is India, 200 is Uraguay...so how to get which country has which 1st three digits.
If you visit www.altavista.com , they successfully detect and match your I.P. and direct you very fast. If you're visiting from India, they will display a pop-up asking you if you wish to goto their Indian site.
Looksmart also does something similar

[deleted]

Unfortunately there is no such breakup. IP numbers are running out, so they have been distributed all over the palce. Definately not into 1.x.x.x, 2.x.x.x etc for each country. First, that would give only 16581375 IP's to each country. I'm sure the USA or Chine/Japan need just a few more than that.

Anon

I am not sure if that is entirely correct...some of the leading web traffic analyser softwares like funnelweb, actually give you a report of user per country to a website...see here for a sample of the report http://www.quest.com/funnel_web/analyzer/sample/Country.html

I used to know a very simple perl program that did this...but can't seem to find this now!

[deleted]

And did you see the '33% unresolved' at the top?
Why do you think the first three are 'unresolved, us-commercial (.com) and network .net'? Yup, that's because this tool also looks at the DNS names, NOT the IP address.

Anon

I wrote the script, which recognizes the country by IP, shows the national flag and play the anthem of the respective country.

Please, visit my page and advise if it worked correctly for your IP/country

http://www.eNetPlanet.com

[deleted]

Nice try, but as expected it completely fails.

Not only does it get very confused about.com domains, it also only looks at where the domain is registered. www.epson.fr for example, is registered in the netherlands, and your script therefore plays the dutch anthem. Cute, but epson.fr is as french as it gets.

In short: nice try, but try again.

Anon

Yes, I agree that the task is formidable.

Nevertheless, for some reason a site, which you mentioned, was registered at Netherlands. It has something to do with Netherlands after all, has not it?

However, my goal is to recognize the IPs of the visitors, not of the websites. It means the IPs of the ISP providers, which are usually next block from a home.

It is clear that a web site can be wherever, For example, my site is at the USA, but I reside at Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the ISP is usually at the country of residence, unless there are people who wish to make international calls to ISPs abroad.

I just started to work on the script. It queries 5 global whois databases one by one.

I am thinking about creating an additional my own database, where I could insert exceptions and sure matches, and which will be checked first.

Alexey
http://www.eNetPlanet.com

Anon

Your're missing the point...the idea here is not to identify where domains are registered, but where a website visitor is coming from; this helps with undertaking activity like customised content based on country, or, detailed reporting on visitors.
There is an interesting website called www.geobutton.com that breaks it down by country...but I suspect this is more a database operation than a script.

Anon

Vincent is certainly right that it is impossible to tell 100% correct, where the visitor sits at the moment.

If I am on holiday at Maurtius and call long distance my ISP at Ukraine to log in, the IP will be of Ukraine. I doubt that anyone could recognize on the fly from where I am calling (except of mythical Echelon people maybe 🙂.

We can speak here only of approximation with fair reliability.

Anon

That just does a whois lookup... Any idiot can do that. Thanks anyways though.