Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!cme!libes
From: libes@cme.nist.gov (Don Libes)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Translating names/addresses to human-readable descriptions
Message-ID: <8698@muffin.cme.nist.gov>
Date: 10 Dec 90 07:30:30 GMT
Organization: National Institute of Standards and Technology
Lines: 34

In perusing our ftp logs, we are trying to figure out who some of the
hosts really are.

About 80% of the IP addresses are successfully mapped back to fully-
qualified domain names (FQDN) by ftpd.  We've found that connecting to
a host's smtp port often yields its name, too.  Between the two of
those, only 2 hosts in 1000 couldn't be mapped to a FQDN.

Unfortunately, some of the names aren't very descriptive.  We'd like
to be able to give a domain to some piece of software and have it tell
us what it is.  (I.e. "nist.gov" => "National Institute of Substandard
Technology, Gaithersburg, MD".)

The whois database at nic.ddn.mil is a start.  It knows all of the
subdomains in the .edu, .com and some other domains.  It seems most
knowledgeable about the .mil domain, returning information about even
subdomains within the subdomains of .mil.

On the other hand, it knows very little about the geographical
domains.  For example, it could tell us that .AT was Austria and .CA
was Canada, but it didn't seem to know subdomains within those.  It
could tell us the domain name servers for those domains, but none of
them run a whois service like nic.ddn.mil.

Is there some way to get this information, short of bothering the
human zone contact for a domain?

In the meantime, we've been translating FQDNs to IP numbers and then
asking the NIC what it knows about the net (i.e., "whois net 129.6.32").
In the case of non-US hosts, this is much more informative than a
domain query, yet it is much less informative than getting a real
answer to the domain question.

Don Libes          libes@cme.nist.gov      ...!uunet!cme-durer!libes