"Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it immediately. " -- Stephen R. Covey
IP Addresses are the key to tracking down spammers and bad bots to your website.
Every computer on the internet is represented by a numerical address called an "IP Address". The IP address consits of four sets of numbers, each separated by a "dot". Here is an example: "201.10.5.101". The example happens to belong to a company in Brazil. Each set of numbers can range from 0 - 255, giving 256 combinations for each set, with a total of almost 4.3 billion combinations for all four groups. A number of possible IP Addresses are reserved for local use on your own computer, so actually not all of the combinations are used on the internet.
It is possible to find out information for the company to which an IP address is assigned. You do this by querying a "Regional Internet Registry whois database".
Because Internet addresses must be unique and because address space on the Internet is becoming limited, there was a need for some organization to control and allocate address number blocks. IP address management was formerly a responsibility of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which contracted with Network Solutions Inc. for the actual services.
In December 1997, IANA turned this responsibility over to ARIN, which, along with Reseaux IP Europeens (RIPE), Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), Latin American and Caribbean IP Address Regional Registry (LACNIC) and African Network Information Center (AfriNIC), now manages the world's Internet address assignments and allocations. The management of domain names is still the separate responsibility of Network Solutions and a number of other registrars accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
We see now that the information about any IP or IP Range is stored in the Regional Internet Registry. As mentioned previously, the 5 main registries are :
AFRINIC: Africa APNIC: Asia and the western Pacific (India , China , Australia) ARIN: North America and parts of the Caribbean (USA and Canada) LACNIC: Latin America and parts of the Caribbean (Mexico and South America continent) RIPE: Europe, Parts of Asia and the Middle East (Greenland , Russia , Europe and middle east)
That basically covers the whole world. For a visual representation check :
The first question you may have is how do I find out the IP address of any bots visiting my website? This can be done by viewing your website access logs. You can also add visitor IP detection to your web page. Subscribers to Schembrionics can download a free script that will track visitor IP addresses and also monitor how may times these visitors or bots visit your site.
An other question you might have is "how do I know which Internet Registry to query?" That's a good question, considering that if you don't know where an IP address is located in the first place, then you don't know which continent/registry it will be listed under. The good news is that if you query the wrong database, you will be told which database to query.
United States
