Every server has an IP address and using specialist websites, a list of domains which point to that IP address can be returned. Several websites do this, and many charge for the service.

If one types in a domain or IP address on myIPneighbors.com, the site lists other domains that point to that IP. It can be a little unreliable, though, no doubt due to the site’s heavy load.

I have already mentioned that this site does have practical uses. It’s interesting to see how packed your host’s server is, so you can see how good a deal you are getting, and what they are hosting. This could be useful as it’s something hosts rarely reveal but is very important to company’s reputations.

It could also make an interesting tool for doing investigations. Using it, you can see what projects companies are launching if they’re silly enough to put the domain on the same server.

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Inexperienced computer users on the other hand might want to take a look at the Simple Static IP networking tool which allows them to set a static IP address with a few clicks of the mouse button.

A user who wants to set a static IP address needs to select the network adapter from the pull down menu on top of the application’s interface. Simple Static IP will then display the current settings of the network adapter including the assigned IP address, subnet, gateway and DNS server.

A click on Enable Static IP will configure a static IP address for the selected network adapter. It is possible to keep the DNS settings or use the router or the Open DNS servers as the dns server for the network adapter. It is also possible to randomize the static IP address by clicking on the Randomize New IP button in the interface.

Simple Static IP is compatible with the following Microsoft operating systems: Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008.

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The program will display its basic interface upon execution that is showing four blank rows. The first two rows display the local area network (LAN) IP and computer name while the two other rows display the IP assigned by the Internet Service Provider and the hostname.

The user has to click on the Find my IP addresses button to start the lookup. IP2 will query one of several IP lookup services on the Internet to display the information in the second row. Each entry can be easily copied to the clipboard by clicking on the Copy button next to each row.

The developer lists the services that are used to lookup the external IP address on the website. IP2 can be downloaded from that website as well. The program has a tiny size of only 8 Kilobytes.

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They did provide a switch in the user control panel to disable that feature again but this is again a company that is forcing the user to take action for something that they changed.

Open DNS has been covered before on this website and I just want to remind everyone that Open DNS can be used to get rid of search boxes from your provider. Setup of Open DNS takes a few minutes at most and should be doable for everyone.

By using the service you start using the Open DNS servers instead of the ones from the Internet Provider. DNS meaning Domain Name System which is responsible for “translating” domain names into IP addresses.

Open DNS provides additional advantages such as phishing protection (that is not slowing down your computer), parental controls, typo corrections and shortcuts. Shortcuts work like Firefox keywords, you basically assign a phrase to an url and can use the phrase to open the website.

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NetCPS – the easier way

This little tool called NetCPS (a single executable file) is rather simplistic, no fancy features as the author (credits to Jarle Aase) says. It pumps 100MB of generated data (without accessing the HDD which could mess with the final result) and then displays the result in form of average speed stated in both KB/s and MB/s. Sourcecode is available for download as well in case you’d like to do some further tinkering with it. Freely usable unless you intend to use it on behalf of military or government.

Example of use:

Server-side end-point: netcps -server
Client-side end-point2: netcps *IP address/hostname of the host*

Additional switches to change the default port (4455) and default amount of transfered data (100MB) are supported. Use the -help switch for further instructions.

Iperf – the powerful way

This tool on the contrary is rather advanced while still maintaining its portability and small size. It can measure performance with many different settings but those are optional and not neccessary for the essential purpose of finding out what the network’s throughput is. You can affect a lot of settings by changing them with various switches. Take notice of the example screenshot for instance, where the port used is changed to 1234, amount of sent data set to 200 MB, interval of reports set to 2 seconds for better accuracy and report format set to MBytes. Iperf can be run as a solid Windows service as well. Here’s a download link to the compiled Windows version of Iperf (a single executable).

Example of use:

Server-side end-point: iperf -s -p 1234
Client-side end-point2: iperf -c *IP address/hostname of the host*

Many additional switches and settings are available for advanced use of this nifty utility. The usual -help switch brings up further instructions again.

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As I said it’s pure entertainment. The website seems to be highly popular because it already analyzed more than 380K IPs over the course of several years. My current IP scored a whopping 10 which is bad if you consider that the leading IP received 86 points but not so bad again if you consider that there are negative scores as well with the lowest being -4 currently.

The only two tests that my IP scored was the poker hand where it qualified for a pair (+5) and that it got only even numbers (+5). Users can take a ride with the random IP script and enter an IP manually to see how other IPs are doing on that website or take a look at the leading or last IPs. As I said pure fun for a little while, nothing more.

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Many workarounds exist that help users access those services even if they are currently residing in a different country. One possibility that I would like to explain today is to configure Tor that way that the exit node lies in the country that you want to access the service in. Tor offers lots of so called nodes which are servers in a specific country running the Tor software.

I’m using Vidalia, a package that contains all necessary programs, to explain how a specific country can be selected when using Tor. Download Vidalia and install the software afterwards. The main program interface should load after the installation.

The control panel is displaying the current status of Tor. Additional information are displayed which we are going to use to find servers located in the country that we need an IP address from. A click on View the network displays a visual representation of all Tor servers but only if Tor is running.

Servers can be sorted by country flag and do have a performance indicator next to them as well. Write down some server names with the best performance and leave the menu again. We need to add those servers as exit nodes to the Tor configuration. A click on Settings and there on the advanced tab displays a menu where you find the entry Tor Configuration Menu.

A click on browse opens the browse for files dialog. Left-click on the file “torrc” and choose edit from that menu. Now add the following two lines to the configuration, just paste it at the beginning for instance:

ExitNodes server1, server2, server3
StrictExitNodes 1

Replace server1, server 2 and so on with the server names that you have written down in the network display window. Stop and restart Tor afterwards and the changes should have been made.

Now we have to add a http proxy to our browser. Firefox users click on Tools > Options > Advanced Network and there on the button Settings. Select Manual Proxy Configuration and enter localhost and port 8118 there.

You can test if everything is working fine by visiting my IP lookup script which should display a IP from the country that you have selected the servers from.

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Peer Guardian already has many IP addresses blocked that are uses by the MPAA to spread fake torrents and record IP addresses of the peers that download the torrents. Blocklist distinguishes the following categories: ads, bogon, edu,game,gov, p2p,phishing, spam and spy. The most important category for most users will be p2p of course and a installed Peer Guardian client will make sure that your client will not connect to the fake torrent clients and IPs. (if they are in the range that is blocked)

You do not need to configure your file sharing application to work with Peer Guardian, everything is done automatically. You can add sites that you definitely need to the allow list to make sure that they will never be blocked by Peer Guardian.

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Whenever you try to access a website you type its url into the address bar. The url is then send to the DNS server who looks up the IP for that website and sends it back to your browser to be able to make the connection to the website. To censor one would simply return no IP or a different IP that redirects to another website. (something like, no no, this is no website that you should visit, bla bla)

This means that the website that you want to access exists of course but the information on the dns server was changed to prevent access. There are two options that let you access the website. The first would be to simply enter the IP address of the website that you want to visit instead of the url. You can use scripts that are freely available on the internet to lookup the IP of an url.

This method is only working if there is only one url that is using that IP. You are out of luck if many websites are hosted on the same server. The second method which is reliable and working for all occasions helps us in this case.

If you change the DNS server that your computer is using to lookup the IP you will receive the correct result. Let us say that you life in China and that China banned access to Wikipedia. Instead of using a Chinese DNS server you use one from the United States which has the information that you need to access Wikipedia.

OpenDNS, a free service, would be one alternative as would be the following list which I have taken from freerk.com

• dns2.de.net – 194.246.96.49 (Frankfurt, Germany)
• ns1.de.eu.orsn.net – 217.146.139.5 (Hildesheim, Germany)
• resolver.netteam.de – 193.155.207.61 (Alfter-Impekoven, Germany)
• sunic.sunet.se – 192.36.125.2 (Stockholm, Sweden)
• master.ns.dns.be – 193.109.126.140 (Leuven, Belgium)
• ns1.lu.eu.orsn.net – 195.206.104.98 (Belvaux, Luxembourg)
• merapi.switch.ch – 130.59.211.10 (Zurich, Switzerland)
• prades.cesca.es – 192.94.163.152 (Barcelona, Spain)
• michael.vatican.va – 212.77.0.2 (Vatican City, Italy)
• dns.inria.fr – 193.51.208.13 (Nice, France)
• ns0.ja.net – 128.86.1.20 (London, UK)
• nic.aix.gr – 195.130.89.210 (Athens, Greece)
• ns.ati.tn – 193.95.66.10 (Tunis, Tunisia)
• ns1.relcom.ru – 193.125.152.3 (Moscow, Russia)
• trantor.umd.edu – 128.8.10.14 (College Park, MD, USA)
• ns1.berkeley.edu – 128.32.136.9 (Berkeley, CA, USA)
• merle.cira.ca – 64.26.149.98 (Ottawa, Canada)
• ns2.dns.br – 200.19.119.99 (Sao Paulo, Brasil)
• ns2.gisc.cl – 200.10.237.14 (Santiago, Chile)
• ns.uvg.edu.gt – 168.234.68.2 (Guatemala, Guatemala)
• ns1.retina.ar – 200.10.202.3 (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• ns.unam.mx – 132.248.253.1 (Mexico City, Mexico)
• ns.wide.ad.jp – 203.178.136.63 (Osaka, Japan)
• ns.twnic.net – 192.83.166.11 (Taipei, Taiwan)
• ns3.dns.net.nz – 203.97.8.250 (Wellington, New Zealand)
• box2.aunic.net – 203.202.150.20 (Melbourne, Australia)

Changing the DNS Server is a matter of minutes. It depends on the operating system that you are using. In Windows XP you open the control panel and click on network connections. You right-click your connection and select Properties from the context menu.

Select the Internet Protocol (TCP / IP) and click on Properties in that menu. Click on use the following DNS server addresses and enter a preferred and alternate DNS server into the fields. Make sure you enter the IPs. Apply and close the menu and restart your computer. Once that is done you are using the new DNS server which should bypass the censorship.

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It also has additional features, like NetBIOS information (computer name, workgroup name, and currently logged in Windows user), favorite IP address ranges, customizable openers, etc.

The tool is mainly useful for system administrators who want to take a quick look at their network and see whats going on. Plugins enhance the tool tremendously, for instance there are plugins that detect ftp servers, windows shares and more. Pretty handy tool if you ask me.

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In addition, CurrPorts allows you to close unwanted TCP connections, kill the process that opened the ports, and save the TCP/UDP ports information to HTML file , XML file, or to tab-delimited text file.

CurrPorts also automatically mark with pink color suspicious TCP/UDP ports owned by unidentified applications (Applications without version information and icons)

#only 36K, freeware, no system changes, download and run
#runs on all windows versions but older versions show less details

download nirsoft.net

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Whenever you connect to a website, start a ftp session, write an email or use a chat client your IP address is transmitted. Ip stands for Internet Protocol and is a 32 bit number that is assigned to every computer connected to the internet. 64.202.163.79 would be an IP address.

You can see that it consists of four 8bit octets each seperated by “.” ranging from 0 to 255.

The most important question is of course: What does the Ip adress tell others about the user behind the IP ?

Most people are not good remembering numbers, thats one of the reasons why the DNS system, Domain Name System, exists. The DNS turns the IP numbers into textform, there are online tools that do that for you, for example dnswatch.info

If you go to the site and enter the Ip 64.202.163.79 you see that the lookup reveals www.ghacks.net, the website you are surfing atm. You could easily exchange www.ghacks.net with the IP and still surf the site, try it if you like.

There are static and dynamic Ip addresses. Static means, the Ip is not changing, most websites have static IPs. Dynamic means it is changing, mostly dialups have these kind of IP addresses.

Now, you probably want to find out about your own ip I suppose ? There are numerous services that display your IP adress when you visit their websites, there are scripts e.g in forum signatures that do the same. One website that offers the service: 1. whatismyipaddress.com

If you want to try others simply use google and search for “what is my ip”

The DNS you find gives you detailed information about the internet provider you use. It sometimes also gives more information, for example a country code cleary shows where the internet provider is located. (for example .de mean germany, .fr is france aso.)

You can find a comprehensive list of country codes here

Let us look at an specific example. Most of you recieve spam mails every day. You normally only see a basic header of the email, giving you basic information like from, to, date and subject for instance. Most mail tools have an option to also display extended header information, thats where the senders IP adress is located.

Here is a typical extended header


Received: from friko7.onet.pl (c-24-20-255-46.hsd1.or.comcast.net [24.20.255.46])
by server6.xlhost.de (Postfix) with ESMTP id D885256215
for [block]3[/block]
To: admin@ghacks.net
Message-ID:
Subject: Account has been created
...


This line “Received: from friko7.onet.pl (c-24-20-255-46.hsd1.or.comcast.net [24.20.255.46])” is the important one. The Ip of the sender is clearly shown 24.20.255.46, so is the DNS c-24-20-255-46.hsd1.or.comcast.net

There are numerous mail tutorials that describe this procedure in greater detail, for now this is all you need to know for our article.

Lets take a look at another example. Maybe you are using an instant messenger and would like to know the ip adress of the people you are chatting with. On Windows XP, select START, then run. Enter “cmd” and then “netstat -n” to see a list of all your active connections.

To recieve a IP adress you need to have a session open with someone, private chat, file transfer etc.. If you do the netstat command without a session you only see the IP of the server that you are connected to, you simply do not need to know the Ip adresses of the other users who are connected until you communicate with them directly.

This have been two examples, I could give you more (for websites, IRC, Bittorent) but thats not part of this tutorial.

What have we learned so far ? Everything you do on the internet also transmits your IP Address.

Your next question probably is the following: If someone has my IP how can he find out more about me ?

As we have seen the DNS lookup gives you information about the provider. They could easily file a complaint at your provider that your IP did the following at a specific day and time.

Or, they could hire a lawyer in your country and file a complaint against the user that used the IP at a specific day and time. They normally don´t know your name until a law enforcement agency asked the provider for all the details they have about this IP at the given time. I can´t speak for every country but for the moment most providers only give out specifics about their users when a law enforcement agency asks for the information.

To clear things up a little bit. Your provider has logs for x days. These logs show at least every IP address assigned to users with information how long the user was online. If someone complained against you the provider simply would search for the specified Ip address in their logs and get all the information about the user behind the IP.

I suggest you ask your provider for how long the logs are stored. Mine for example stores them only for a maximum of 24 hours, but I heard of some that save them for up to six months.

That means, for as long as your internet provider has your connection information in their logs someone could find out about you.

I hope you found the information provided useful, I will write an anonymity tutorial soon.

Technorati Tags: Ip, Address, Anonymous, Email, Header, DNS

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