Gerrit Muller wrote: > thanks for your suggestion. I did indeed look broader than whois, and > reverse DNS maybe a better description. Unfortunately I did try the > socket.gethostbyaddr("194.109.137.226"), but the result was a > disappointing "host not found", both at home on an XP machine as well as > at work on a NT machine. Your comments stimulated me too experiment with > this apporach, and I discovered that unresolved IP addresses in my old > logfiles return "host not found". However many IP addresses in my new > logfile can be translated successfully! Apparantly there are IP > addresses that cannot be reversely resolved by the DNS servers. I did > translate these addresses manually so far via the whois service. So you > definitely helped me a lot, but I keep interested in a complementary > whois solution.
If the address doesn't get mapped to a name by a DNS server, I strongly suspect you will get nowhere with whois, or much else. Not all IP addresses have corresponding domain names: many are dynamic addresses assigned on the fly to arbitrary customers of (for example) cable modem service providers, and they're often not interested in providing any reverse mapping for them. Some do (for example, mine is pc-136-15.scpe.powergate.ca right now), but many don't... I'm sure there's a way to identify the domain of the owner of a block of addresses in which a given IP resides. I don't know what it is. -Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list