Ewhois is a free online service that can lookup information about a website online. All you need to do is to enter a url into the form on the service’s frontpage. Make sure you only enter the domain name and no protocol in the form. A click on search submits the site to the service, which, after some magic, displays its findings on the results page.

The results page displays general information about the selected domain at the top. You see the domain’s IP address, Google Analytics ID, Pagerank, Alexa and Compete Rank as well as the data of the last update. The amount of sites that share the same IP address and Google Analytics ID are also displayed here.

Below that is a tabbed interface that displays the contents of the reverse IP lookup, Reverse Google Analytics ID Lookup, Google Adsense ID Lookup and Whois Record. The Adsense and Analytics tabs are only displayed if the scripts are embedded on the target site.

The reverse IP lookup tab displays all websites that are hosted on the same IP address. Websites with an Alexa rank of less than 1000000 are displayed with their Alexa rank on screen. All others with a link to the website and a link to run the lookup for that site on eWhois.

Both the Reverse Google Adsense and Google Analytics ID lookup list websites that use the very same scripts on their sites. This can be usually tied to the same owner directly. The script may not list all sites of the owner in the listing. Still, the sites listed can reveal useful information about the original site’s owner.

Ewhois’ service sets itself apart from other services by displaying all the lookups that other services are usually only offering on separate pages. It is easy to use and comes without obtrusive advertising.

It is relatively easy to check for whois information, which may give you information about the domain’s registrar, and more importantly, the name of the registrant, administrative and technical contacts. It is a good sign if those match.

But what about finding out where a website is hosted? You could look up the IP of the website and look at the company who owns that IP range, but that is rather complicated and not as speedy as the following option.

The website Who Is Hosting This offers an online service that will give you information about the company that is hosting a website. Why would you want those information? If you are like me, you’d like to verify the seller’s claims. But you could also use it if you are a webmaster and stumble upon a super fast loading site, or if you want to contact the hosting company, for instance if the website in question is infringing on copyright.

All you need to do to find out where a website is hosted, is to enter the website’s url into the form on the service’s frontpage. A click on Search displays the results after a short scan on the next page.

The screen displays a thumbnail image of the website and the hosting company prominently. The latter with a link to its web page, if available.

Listed on the page are furthermore the website’s IP address, name servers and links to futher details. This includes Whois lookup, DMCA Takedown and the BuiltWith website.

The whois links directly to the registrar’s whois page, DMCA Takedown to a service that sets you back $99 for filing a DMCA notice, monitoring the site for removal, filing a DMCA with major search engines and preservation of the evidence trail.

Built With finally displays technical information about a website. This includes server information, advertising, analytics and tracking or frameworks used.

Who Is Hosting This is a nice to have service. It works really well for most domain lookups. I have tested it with US-based and German domains. The links to the company websites are not working all the time, especially if a parent company is listed and not the hosting company. Users can add webhost urls in this case to fix that issue, provided that they know the host. If they do not they still need to research the company on a search engine like Bing and Google for that information.

WhoisThisDomain is a free portable Nirsoft application that simplifies the process, at least for Windows users. The program can be used to look-up one or multiple domains names. Even better, it will automatically request the information from the right server so that you do not have to worry about that at all anymore.

A choose domains screen is displayed on first startup. You can enter or paste domain names into the form that you want to retrieve whois information from. Domain names can be entered one per line, or separated by commas or spaces.

Once you are done editing it will try to retrieve domain name information for each domain name that you have entered or pasted into that form.

A wait period of ten seconds between look-ups ensures that you do not hammer whois servers. You can change that number on the chose domains screen.

Another interesting option is the ability to build domain lists. These add selected domain name extensions to names automatically, so that you do not have to enter them manually in case you want to look-up multiple domain name extensions (e.g. ghacks.net, ghacks.de)

Each domain is displayed in a row in the main interface. Lights at the beginning of each row indicate whether a domain is online or not. Following in line are the domain name, whois source, domain status and information when the domain name expires, when it was created and last updated.

The whois information are displayed after you select a domain from the list. The output depends largely on the source. Some companies return the registrants name for instance, while others do only return generic information.

A whois on google.com for instance returns the Dns Admin as the registrant. All information can be copied and pasted. Records can also be saved to a text file or HTML file.

Advanced users can override the default whois server list by adding their own whois servers to the program. You need to create the text file whois-servers.txt and place it in the program directory. Whois information need to be added in the way domain-extension whois-server to the text file. Check out the program homepage for some examples.

WhoisThisDomain supports both generic and country code domains. The tool is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Windows operating system from Windows 2000 to the very latest Windows 7.

But the standard tools of the operating system are not the only tools that can be used for the purpose of troubleshooting or analyzing a host or connection. The two other available options are online tools and third party applications.

VTrace is a portable third party application for Windows, that combines access to several networking tools in its program interface.

Among them the ability to execute a trace and ping to a host, whois information, DNS lookup, a basic port scan, netstat and net information.

One interesting aspect of the program is that most of the tools can be executed at once, by entering a host name and hitting the Go button. It is however also possible to start the available tools individually.

vtrace

The traceroute and ping commands are especially interesting, as they offer visual information besides the standard textual ones. It is possible to extend the program with a geo database which can be downloaded directly from within the program

whois dns lookup

The Whois information support several of the most important registries, including ARIN for North America, RIPE for Europe, Middle East and Central Asia, INTERIC for gloabl lookups or LACNIC for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The port scan can be used to find open ports. It is either possible to run a probe on the most common ports, or define a port scan and scan all ports in that range.

VTrace informs the user if specific services, such as FTP, Telnet or SSH are running on the host. The wealth of features coupled with portability makes VTrace a recommended program for users who need to analyse hosts or connections in a graphical user interface.

The portable program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows. Downloads are provided at the developer website at Vtrace.pl.

With the help of the GNOME Nettools you can have a sweet collection of powerful tools that will help you to troubleshoot your network in no time. And this collection of tools is all wrapped up into a user-friendly graphical interface. So without any further adieu, let’s take a look at this powerful suite of tools.

Features

The GNOME Nettools includes the following tools:

• Devices: Have all information about your networking devices at your fingertips.
• Ping: Get detailed information using the ping tool.
• Netstat: Get detailed information about your routing table, active network services, and multicast information about your machine.
• Traceroute: Trace the path to a network host.
• Port scan: Scan for open ports on servers and desktops.
• Lookup: Get detailed information about a server.
• Finger: Lookup a users finger entry.
• Whois: Lookup a whois entry for a domain.

GNOME Nettools also features:

• Copy information to text report.
• Help system.
• Drop downs for previously entered addresses/domains.
• Easy to use GUI.

Now let’s take a look and see how this tool is used.

Usage

Figure 1

As you can see there has been no mention of installation. That is because GNOME Nettools is installed by default. In order to start up the tool you only have to go to the Administration sub-menu of the System menu. Once you have fired up the tool you will be greeted with main window at the Devices tab. This tab is where you gather the information about your installed networking devices. As you can see (In Figure 1) there is plenty of detailed information about my default eth0 interface. You can switch this to display information about any connected internet device you have on the machine by using the Interface drop-down.

The next tab, Ping, is where you can actually start troubleshooting networking issues. Ping is almost always one of the first tools I use, but I generally use it in command line form. Since most new Linux users prefer to not use the command line – you can still get your ping on with Nettools. Click on the Ping tab to reveal how the Ping tool works (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

By default the Nettools Ping tool will be configured for a limited 5 requests. You can up that number or even change it to an unlimited number if you need. In Figure 2 I have sent 5 ping requests to an internal server and received 100% sucess on my packets. I know this server is at least responding.

The other tools will all work exactly as you would expect them. One thing that is nice is as a tool is working you can switch over to another tool without disrupting the original tools task. This is especially nice when running a traceroute that can take a while (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

The traceroute tool will follow a path, hop for hop, to a destination you enter. In Figure 3 I ran a traceroute on www.google.com which ended before it reached its goal. This, of course, was only to show you the output of the traceroute (as there is not much I can personally do if my route to www.google.com is stopped outside of the boundaries of my network or my service providers network. But it gives you an idea of where the route stops. If this were a corporate issue, and the destination was one I had to reach, I would know precisely where the last known successful hop was (in the case of Figure 3 – after the 65.222.158.82 address).

I can then use the Whois tool to discover who is connected to that address. By clicking on the Whois tab and then entering the IP address above I receive the following information:

MCI Communications Services, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business UUNET65 (NET-65-192-0-0-1)
65.192.0.0 - 65.223.255.255
SPLICE COMMUNICATIONS, INC. UU-65-222-158-80-D4 (NET-65-222-158-80-1)
65.222.158.80 - 65.222.158.87

If www.google.com were a critical address for me (and my company) to reach for work (or a host of my company’s web site) I could at least contact the owner of this domain.

Final thoughts

As you would expect, the rest of the Nettools tools work in a very similar fashion than their command line counter parts. The only difference? You don’t have to open up a terminal window to use them. No commands to remember, no commands to type. Just easy network analysis, with the help of a user-friendly GUI tool.

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, 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.

Update: Site seems to be down for some time know, an alternative is DomainByIP

Most operating systems have those tools on board and it is normally not required to use an external tool. Many users however do not like to work with the command line in Windows and prefer a graphical user interface instead. Many also have difficulties issuing the correct commands, e.g. finding out how to save the result in a text document automatically.

eToolz is a collection of network and Internet tools that provides a graphical interface for several common commands. This includes ping and tracert but also DNS and whois lookups, mail checks, the retrieval of http headers, time synchronization, pagerank check and list with useful information (default ports, domain extensions).

Most functions come with several options. It is for instance possible to select one of six whois databases, define timeouts, ping counts or the maximum amount of hops of a tracert. Every echo in the program can be copied normally. Five languages are supported: German, English, French, Portuguese and Dutch although a few of the information are still not translated and therefor in German.

The developer of the product uses Google Translate to provide an English version of the homepage, ever heard of Nazi lookups ? Yeah, me neither.

WhosIP displays the IP owner, contact information (always an email address, but often phone and fax as well), country where that IP is located and additional information. Maybe you are asking yourself why someone would need that kind of information. This is important if someone attacks your computer for instance, or if someone spams your website and you want to check on his IP to find someone to contact about the spam.

WhosIP is a command line utility for Windows. You unpack it into a directory of your choice and use the command whosip domain/IP to get information about that domain or IP.

The additional parameter -r displays additional information that is not displayed if you don’t use it. An example would be whosip -r www.ghacks.net to receive extensive information about the hoster of Ghacks.