Finding the location of an IP address?

[chechi]

Is it possible to find out where a person lives with their IP address, or even an email address or something? Thanks

 

[heartsurgeon]

do a google search for neotrace

great program that will graphically show where a ip address is "located"

gives you info about the service provider at that end as well

does not give you street address or anything that precise.

 

[chechi]

Thanks I used it and actually it did give me an address. Now is there anywhere I can put in an address and it will give me a name?

 

[Viper GTS]

<< Thanks I used it and actually it did give me an address. Now is there anywhere I can put in an address and it will give me a name? >>



The most you'd be able to get would be the administrative contact address of their ISP.

Viper GTS

 

[Cerebus451]

NeoTrace will give you the address of the ISP that is providing the IP address. Unless you are trying to track down a company, you won't be able to figure out where the person with the IP address actually lives. You would have to get a court order to get the ISP to check their logs and give you the name/address of the person that had the given IP address at the given time.

For instance, if you use NeoTrace on my cable modem IP address, NeoTrace will draw a dot in Coudersport, PA, because that is where Adelphia is headquartered, and thus where their IP addresses are registered. However, I actually do not live in Coudersport, PA.

If you are looking for a company, then you can do a domain name lookup to get the info on who applied for the domain name.

 

[docmanhattan]

Visual Route is a pretty good app for that as well.

 

[chechi]

ah ok, I am just trying to get a name or email thats all. But I guess its impossible.

 

[jjones]

An IP won't give you a user's name or e-mail address unless the IP corresponds to a domain owned by the user when you can do a whois lookup. Other than that you'll just get the ISP info that the user has services with.

 

[Descartes]

As others have noted, you can't obtain the email address/name of the an individual using a given ip address. This is a very good thing. As an ip address is an addressing scheme for computers only, there's no direct correlation between an ip address and our names. You can lookup the "parent" owner of any given ip by using arin. It simply uses the whois proto to obtain address information. I often run whois from the command-line to obtain said information. e.g.

whois -h www.arin.net xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

It might respond w/...

Southwestern Bell Internet Services (NETBLK-SBIS2) SBIS2
208.188.0.0 - 208.191.255.255
Some Company (NETBLK-ETC) SOMETHING xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx-xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

You could also look it up by the handle, in the above case, "NETBLK-SBIS2."

whois -h www.arin.net !NETBLK-SBIS2

A whois client is rather simple. You could even telnet to port 43 of www.arin.net (or any other server w/ a whois daemon, whois.dotster.com, whois.register.com, etc.) and type in the domain/ip address, you'll get the same information.