My little diversion I did cause I was a little bored.

[LiveVoltage]

So I decided to do this little thing as a project and see what results I got.

 

As some of you may know, im currently learning about networking in my Desktop Technician program and I wanted to figure out where the physical location (server) that this website was being held on so here is what I did...

 

I opened my command prompt, running it with administrator privileges. and typed the following commands being displayed in the code as follows and the follow up results from the commands I put in...

 

C:\windows\system32>nslookup ffxiv-roleplayers.com
Name: (of the server the look up is sent from)
Address: (youre server's address)

non-authoritative awnser:
Name:ffxiv-roleplayers.com
Address:192.185.16.72 (this is the actual phyisical hosts site's IP address.)

c:\windows\system32>tracert 192.185.16.72

After 14 hops later from tracing the route of the IP address I put in the very last command, it let me to a physical server address located somewhere out in Washington state. There wasn't an exact location listed but it did list the ISP that the servers were owned and maintained by so if I did a follow up check on their physical servers, I bet I could find the ACTUAL location of the server the site is hosted on.

 

Isn't technology amazing?   

[Faye]

And here Ashren or whatever the fellow's name was caused a fuss about me cross-referencing IP addresses.

[LiveVoltage]

Well yeah, people are pretty big about their anonymity on the internet. I mean, I can only find the server address right now. I wouldn't be able to find where everyone's private systems actually were unless I had direct access to the server and the list of IP addresses that it actually interacted with it.

 

I digress though but its not that extremely difficult to find this stuff out. 

[FreelanceWizard]

O ho ho ho. So sure of this, are you? We're actually currently hosted in Houston, TX, in HostGator's data center. The traceroute is actually a bit devious, as Comcast evidently peers with HostGator's ISP at Microsoft's peering point in Washington (AS8075). The next hop, 216.117.50.142, is CyrusOne, a data center provider in whose Houston, TX data center HostGator's racks reside. My guess is that Microsoft leases some space from them to run part of Azure, and Comcast just takes advantage of the peering point.

 

You should check out the tools at DNSstuff -- they're quite awesome and include a great IP geolocation tool.

 

Going forward, our shiny new AWS virtual servers (currently in testing and looking good!) are hosted in the North Virginia region, in availability zone 1a. Our DNS is hosted by AWS Route 53, which has servers all over.

 

A quick run of whois will find that, yes, the domain is now under secret registration with dyn.com, which is less a function of "OMG none must know who I am" and more "I don't want spammers to bug me using whois info."

[LiveVoltage]

Well im still learning so im not mad at being shown I was wrong. Im pretty bad at networking and im still trying to wrap my head around it, lol.  

[FreelanceWizard]

You were on the right track, though. The traceroute is just devious because of the weird peering. It's like how you have to fly to Atlanta to get anywhere on Delta, even if it's several hundred miles away from where you're actually trying to go.

[Coatleque]

I don't think I've ever used tracert and solved anything with the results.

Most anything I do on the networking side is with ping, and maybe nslookup to verify mx records for email routing.

 

Of course what I do is more on the Desktop/Server OS side of things and less on the topology side.

[LiveVoltage]

Yeah but still, all this networking stuff is very confusing to me. Its probably the thing that I have the most trouble with. I have any trouble with.     ._.