Traceroutes

[Damini]

Ok, now I have a forum on my website, and since it is aimed at kids I have to be quite wary about who joins up and so on.

Being exceedingly 133t, I can run traceroutes.

However, I was hoping for some magical box to open up at the end, and spoon feed me information that makes sense. "It looks like you are trying to run a traceroute," says the paperclip, "you have traced an [albanian handbag salesman]." Can someone explain to me what on earth it is I'm looking at? You know, tracerouting for idiots or some such? Am I meant to be actually able to gleen some information from all this? I must admit, I just did it because I'd heard the grown ups do it, like when you come home and find your kid's face in tatters because they imitated dad shaving, but now I think I should probably get a clue.

Please don't mock too much.

 

[TdC]

tbh I don't really think it will be overly handy Lou. at best you will be able to semi-trace people to countries of origin. you won't be presented with a home address, but you may be able to discover their ISP. I'd get a visual trace programme that will translate the meaningless rows of numbers into something more understandable by the less tech savvy really.

best guess: you may be able to see that John, a young kid from Ireland may actually be an advertising person called Hung Low originating from Taiwan
worst guess: you will have to resort to more people orientated skills to detect the nefarious Mr Low.

Added boon: you'll be able to see that young Jimmy may also be young Johnny because they share the same IP. This may also not be the case if that IP turns out to be a proxy server.

 

[Chilly]

 1  r-gw-2.london.x-ip.net (193.238.83.253)  0.388 ms  0.326 ms  0.361 ms
 2  195.72.128.13 (195.72.128.13)  0.519 ms  0.462 ms  0.456 ms
 3  gi3-8.telehouse-east.bdr.enta.net (84.45.244.197)  0.543 ms  0.502 ms  0.506 ms
 4  linx-1.router.demon.net (195.66.224.12)  2.303 ms  1.202 ms  1.404 ms
 5  anchor-inside-3-g2-0-0.router.demon.net (193.195.25.1)  1.709 ms  0.852 ms  0.748 ms
 6  anchor-access-3-g1-1.router.demon.net (194.159.161.65)  0.920 ms  0.851 ms  0.805 ms
 7  anchor-hg-3-g3-0-0-s154.access.demon.net (194.159.161.132)  0.975 ms  1.421 ms  1.348 ms
 8  my.house.co.uk (80.176.1.2)  15.787 ms  17.868 ms  14.699 ms

OK. All you are looking at in a traceroute is the last couple of hops normally. In this case I've traced myself from some other box in london and predictably it's all stayed within the .uk/.net (.net can be anywhere, so if you see a .net domain, look in the first part of the hostname for geographical clues, nearly all big time routers will have location in their hostnames somewhere).

This is all fine and dandy for working out where someone is posting to your site from but that isnt exactly that useful. It's a good tool if you mistrust someone and feel like taking a closer look but as a general tool its pretty useless for your purposes.

You are probably better off just being a turbo nazi mod (we all know you've still got it!) and nuking the pedos a mile away.

 

[Damini]

Heh, someone joined up the other day and listed their hobbies as "sex".

Yeah, like that's not going to get you smited.

 

[Will]

Make me a mod. I'll ban them all.

 

[Chilly]

Heh, someone joined up the other day and listed their hobbies as "sex".

Yeah, like that's not going to get you smited.

That's almost *too* stupid for a pedo. Maybe it was just a 10 year old trying to look cool in front of all the hot 10 year old honeys!

 

[Damini]

At the moment, it's not the baggy anorak brigade that I'm really worried about as PMs are off and I don't think you can see people's e-mail addresses (can you?) so it's more the spammers, advertisers, and so on.

 

[Chilly]

MSN messenger addresses are viewable, but emails are not. ICQ/AIM probably are too but I didnt find any of those.

 

[Will]

They are normally pretty obvious. Just ban them when you catch the first posting, then get deleting. At least, thats what I do.

 

[TdC]

ban&delete the evildoer's leavings tbh.

 

[Alan]

Urm... a trace route shows you the route taken from the client to host. If you just want to know where they are located you can do this through a simple DNS query.

 

[Chilly]

Not all hosts have hostnames provided by their ISP (most do, but still).

LOUISE HAS SPOKEN.

Hehe, those fanboys on your site damini

 

[Damini]

Urm... a trace route shows you the route taken from the client to host. If you just want to know where they are located you can do this through a simple DNS query.

Ahah. I have lots of these options open to me, for I am the all powerful admin lady, I just did the traceroute because it was the only word I'd heard of.



Edit:// you want to know what's scary, Chilly? One of them has read the first book 15 times. FIFTEEN. She knows my book better than me. :/

 

[Chilly]

Just don't ever, ever agree to meet her/him else itl be stalk-tastic for the rest of your life.

How the hell can you read a book 15 times over. Even the best, most thrilling, deep, complex and nutty books I've read can only stand two readings within a year of each other else it just gets boring.

 

[TdC]

I read LOTR 31 times up to now. I also read WOT1 through 10 5 times. yes I am a nerd with no life

 

[Chilly]

lotr 31 times? Are you ill?

 

[TdC]

well, no, but I really liked the book, and I liked discovering that I saw the book differently as I progressed in age. tbh I think I read Sho-Gun ten times or so as well. I guess I picked up the habit when I was little. We lived in an Indonesian jungle, and new books were hard to come by. I'd read every book in the house at least once, including my parent's books, by the time I was 6.

 

[Mey]

HEY! and me too! don't leave me out! i love talking! (ask anybody)
has anybody heard from LOuise? she hasn't even emailed me back yet and she's not been on the forum. does anybody know if she's ok???

Dear God, what evil is this?

 

[Damini]

Hush, Mey. Get your own stalker.

Btw, can't remember if I said this yet, but there's a [westwood] shout out [/westwood] to FH in the second book. It's subtle. Ish. Well, subtle for me.

 

[Will]

We need Westwood tags. I didn't realise it until now.

 

[JingleBells]

No, we need to tag westwood

 

[Draylor]

Well this is FH, any attempt at an ontopic reply after its gone astray is pointless, but anyway ...

It depends on exactly what you are trying to do, but it seems like traceroute is the wrong tool for the job. Sure itll show you the routers etc between you and the target IP address but all too often there is little or no useful information in there to accurately know what country the IP address relates to.

Whois: best accessed using the good old commandline Unix tool., but thats of little use from Windows. There are a million web-based sites that offer the same functionality. Random example: http://whois.domaintools.com/193.138.95.142 shows the details for FH, simple location (country) and registration details. Substitute in any random IP address you are interested in.

Alternatively there are 101 companies/websites thatll give you their best guess at the location of any IP address. Examples http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm or http://www.hostip.info/index.html . Or maybe find another since one of those thinks FH is in Germany and the other has no clue

 

[Damini]

To be honest, it was really a case of monkey see, monkey do. There was a poster last night that I thought was a bit suspect - first post was a thread called "is it real?" asking about if it was true that most bags you buy online are fakes, doubled up with another post in a thread of mine that just said "thats not cool". Add to this a link in her hobbies to a handbag site under construction, and well... trying to sell stuff to kids is bad, mmkay.

Unless it's my book. Then it's fine. Heh.

Anyway, Kenny wandered into the bedroom last night saying he had done a trace route, or something, and corporate IP, or something, and I didn't really get it but was too knackered to say. So, in Kenny's abscence this morning I decided to play with all the tools at my disposal, only to discover that I had no bloody clue what I was doing. Hence this thread. So what exactly am I trying to do? Not entirely sure. I just don't want to ban an honest person who likes handbags pre-emptively, but since I can't moderate 24 hrs a day, I don't want to leave a spamwhore on my forums. Since I'm now running these forums, and have all those odd buttony options, I also think I should probably know what they do

Anyway, I banned them now. Not because I worked out what I was doing, but just because my life is run in a series of interconnected whims.

 

[Draylor]

Well, not to inflate your ego any further but your books seem to be sold around the world at this stage: I just dont see what use traceroute/geographic location information will make to you.

If a post looks dodgy/unwanted/whatever does it matter if it appears to have been posted from England, France or Iraq? Delete first, ban later.

I can see why you are concerned though: there seem to be some rather dodgy characters around your forums, quite a bit older than your target audience

 

[Damini]

My ego is not inflated. You little, insignificant people just say that kind of thing to feel better about your small, meager lives.

 

[Jupitus]

I can see why you are concerned though: there seem to be some rather dodgy characters around your forums, quite a bit older than your target audience

*bans Draylor*

 

[Trem]

At the moment, it's not the baggy anorak brigade that I'm really worried about

Even so thats a horrid thought. Jesus christ I would want to traceroute to their address and burn them if anyone tried to get a poke out of my kid through a kids book website.

What a world.

 

[Damini]

Of course it's something you have to be aware of, which is why, straight off the bat, no private messages or e-mail addresses given. Any discussion has to take place on the boards. I'm toying with the idea of disallowing ICQ/msn messenger things in the profile too. I mean, what do the parents here think? I don't want to be too strict, and I want to allow a community to grow, but at the same time...

 

[Trem]

It is just shocking that you have to even think about such things, but you do.

Certainly have no ICQ or MSN names on there, surely thats the first place a fiddler would start.

 

[TdC]

*groom Trem*

tbh I'd watch the forums with eagle eyes. I've a vague idea that kids "know" not to tell their house address to strangers etc.etc. but they don't "really know" not to do such a thing. tbh I'd dissallow it through the forums. they're going to talk to each other anyway I guess, with or without your help, but you don't have to open the door imo.