On Sat, 29 May 2004, Scott Harney wrote: > I can't believe no one answered this yet. whois. > > As in 'whois ip.ad.dr.ess' . Most linux distributions have a whois > client either already included or available via a package.
To elaborate a little further on Scott's reply, IP address assignments are handled by 4 different registries around the world, similar to how DNS is handled. ARIN (American Registry on Internet Numbers) is the registry in the US. See www.arin.net. RIPE (www.ripe.net) handles Europe, APNIC (www.apnic.net) for Asia, and LACNIC (www.lacnic.net) handles Latin America. The IP registries know all about which ISP owns a specific IP address. Some versions of whois on redhat want you to specify the whois server to use, like whois [EMAIL PROTECTED] ARIN also runs the special top level domain in-addr.arpa, which is used for reverse DNS lookups. You may have seen reference to this domain when using the host command for a reverse lookup. Notice the IP is backwards, just like the reverse DNS zone file. [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ host 147.174.1.23 23.1.174.147.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer vulcan.csd.selu.edu. One common mistake people make when changing/moving their nameservers is they make appropriate changes to forward DNS records with their registrar, but forget to make the same changes with their IP registry. Then reverse DNS breaks, and everything else that depends on it. > There are alternate traceroute clients which can pull Autonomous System > numers (BGP) and you can feed those into traceroute as well. The IP registries also assign ASN's (Autonomous System numbers), which are used by BGP routers on the internet. Each autonomous (independent) network needs a unique ASN numbers. If you just have one ISP, you might not need an ASN. But a large org that has multiple ISP's and does BGP routing between them probably has an ASN. At that point they are autonomous, independent of any one ISP. ray
