ok someone told me when someone is trying to hack into ur comp, get their ip from firewall and go to www.arin.net

Well, to test it out i tried it with my IP address, but heres the results taht i got:



It says Herndon, Virgina...but i live in Texas
Is there an explanation for this?
Or is arin not really correct or something?

yep

HAHA Cheap Asian  


You don't have to pay to use it... You just have to pay for advanced stuff... you can register for free and use it at http://visualroute.visualware.com/

From visual route site:


So I'm guessing visualroute is at least 1/2 crap, especially if you see your trace taking some stupid path to get somewhere.  I'd almost be willing to bet that the software just draws a line across the map and doesn't actually do any kind of advanced identification on a router...how could you?

Unless you take the hostname of the router and use that in considering its' location:



But that would be far from accurate.

I've been in *real* routers before and I don't ever recall any type of geographic setting in them, it would have to be a country abbreviation or code along with zip code for it to be any kind of useful information for outside sources.

Think visualroute for a second, assume a router DID return "salem, ma, usa".  Visualroute would still have to calculate WHERE salem, ma usa is on a map.

And even if a router did return something like "99501, USA".  Visual route would have to have a complete listing of where "99501" is.  PLUS, it would have to define those areas on the map for boundries.

I bet it's just going off of registration.  Or just making crap up.  How are we really going to know if our 4th hop router IS where they say it is. lol.

Anytime I trace anything on the map it always shows Atlanta,thats because my Cox connection is being routed through Atlanta its their main Hub.If I send CA3LE an email, he is 125 miles north of me but the route would go through Atlanta first.This is common in all sorts communication if I make a phone call across the street its possible that it can go 22,000 miles up through a satellite or in the old days when it was Microwave it could travel a great distance. I think its UPS that no matter where you send a package it will go to Tennessee first (not sure of city) so Im not sure exactly why but all routes dont always take the short way.As you know the physical address is different than the IP address,if you would like send me a PM and Ill give you my IP address and you will see what Im saying.I talk to someone all the time in Slovakia and when I trace it, it is coming out of London, but  if I gave the info to ARIN or IANNA they could find the exact location.We see..... but only as much as they want us to see,just like the GPS toy it is only close because the government doesnt want the civilian population to have the same resources as the military....which is probably a good idea:)
  Microwave

Colorado

it's going off of Arin entirely:


Bet your provider IS VERIO though.  So Visual Route is next to worthless, because it is indeed going off of what Arin says and Arin is going to report wherever corporate headquarters is (mostlikely).  But you could buy up a Class C network, subnet it down and setup networks all over the world using those Class C addresses and Arin would report the IP's as wherever you registered them to when you bought them.

Nice little experiment.


And just for the sake of argument...while it is quite possible for packets to be routed the "long way" around, there are usually certain routing protocols set up to take the fastest path.

OSPF (open shortest path first) enabled routers collect information about a bunch of different routers and use algorithms to determine the best way to send the packets.

Microwave,




But I thought we had established the fact that these map-based tracert's rely entirely on Arin.  So a company could have registered with Arin as being in Atlanta, but they actually operate out of California.  Any packets that traverse that router (which is mostlikely in California) are going to show up on these map-based traces as traversing a router in Atlanta.

Get it?