IP Addresses...What can you do with one?

ChristopherP

ChristopherP

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Apart from being unique to each computer, what can you do with an IP address?

Like can you find out where someone lives? Who they are with? that kind of thing...?
 
good question.................

im familiar with pinging, just sending out a ping to another person using their ip address and seeing the response time.
 
Yes - i ping internal IP addresses on my network and also DNS servers to see if they are working...

But was wondering what you can actually do with an IP address :)
 
Chris you can certainly find the internet service provider details of the owner of that IP and the country of origin .. i think from there you would have to go through the internet service provider for further details of that IP..

I Think!... lol
 
u can also ping EXTERNAL IP Adrresses aswell

its possible to ping anyone i think!
 
How do you ping someone and what good would it do? Would it let you know they were online?
 
Pinging is a diagnostic tool to establish whether a computer or network device is responding, you can use the ping command on either a LAN or WAN.

When you ping another computer or device it basically sends a packet of data to the destination ip address or DNS name and see how quick the packet is returned. obviously if the packet is not returned the computer or device is not online.

LAN = Local Area Network (ie a office or home network)
WAN = Wide Area Network (ie, the internet)
DNS = Domain Naming Service (ie, www.google.co.uk is the DNS address which would resolve to the IP address 216.239.39.147)

From an IP address you can find out the general location of the server that issues the IP but not the location of the computer that is using the IP. and yes you can ping an IP address to find out if someones online. although this is not a reliable method of finding out if your mates are online as IP addresses assigned by ISP's often change. (DNS names generally don't).

To find out if google.co.uk is online you would open a command prompt window and type "ping 216.239.39.147" if the servers online you will get a reply, (well four reply's) if it isn't the ping will either timeout or you will receive an error message along the lines of "destination not accessible"

quite boring really.
 
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