Section (1c): Geography & Ownership: ARIN

While most folks navigate the Internet using top level domains (as we saw in the section on whois), under the hood of every domain and host name rests a numeric address. In some contexts it may be necessary to look up the ownership of a numeric address in order to determine the approximate geographic location of a server or provider. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) website (http://www.arin.net) allows one to look up the registration information of Internet addresses.

Step one:

Enter a numeric address in the top left hand corner of the ARIN website:

Step two:

ARIN should return information that looks similar in format to the retrieval of the IP information listed below:

After looking up the ownership of 64.207.131.106, we find that the IP address is registered to the organization we would expect, Media Temple. Net:

Copy and paste the IP information you retrieved into the section provided on your worksheet. Now that you have retrieved your IP information, answer the following questions about your IP address here:

Worksheet area:

(1) When was the IP address first registered by the organization? 9/16/2002

(2) Who is located as the technical contact for your IP address? dnsadmin@mediatemple.net and mailto:abuse@mediatemple.net

(3) What other information, if any, stands out? The registration date for the addresses is relatively new. Either the ISP has not been around for very long or they recently acquired more addresses from ARIN.

Summarizing the importance of IP lookup

Looking up IP addresses is an important fall back to verify the hosting information of domain names. Also we will often run into addresses hosting documents that for whatever reason do not resolve to a domain name. Determining the ownership of the block of IP addresses can provide important administrative and geographic information about the IP address. In terms of reflection, it's also important to note how domain names are rhetorically mapped on to Internet addresses. While this research technique is usually not necessary, understanding how IP addresses work “under the hood” of domain names is as important part of gaining a broader handle on the network literacy techniques in this article.