IP and physical location.

I know that you can find the country that an IP is in and the ISP, using this command: nslookup <ip>

If you wanted to find the address of the household, or datacenter or whatever, that is using a specific IP address, how would you go about it?

 

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Anyone with a minimal amount to technical skill can use a proxy server, which can make it appear as though they are anywhere in the world rather than where they actually are.
If you use Tor, or any other onion skin routing system, you can repeatedly change your proxy ip, making it next to impossible to track you down.

 

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You can't find the address of the household by IP. You can find the location of the ISP that owns that IP address, and the registered office of the people that own or registered a domain name (if it's a .com, not all domains require full contact details).

I'm not going to volunteer the method however.

 

Not sure exactly of the context in which you are asking, but this link will take you to the city level for most IPs.

As phlogistician pointed out, you can only get to the ISP, and that can be done in several ways.

http://www.networldmap.com/TryIt.htm

Site disclaimer:
"Currently it can only locate about 97.8% of the Internet's address space."

 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5791 this is a cool addon... give it a shot it's pretty accurate... i assume everyone on a science forum is intelligent enough to be running firefox...

finding the address is a bit much... not really possible for residential households really, without ISP info on customers, or someone careless enough to post information that would reveal their location...

address lookups are possible with businesses or datacenters pretty easy if you know what you're doing... but this usually brings you the address of the hosting company... but if it's a smart business they registered control of the domain they use to themselves, and you have info from that...

you can traceroute an IP... and if enough routers are responding to traces you can easily track down the location to a city... this forum can see your IP now and know where you are posting from... they use that info in banning people... whether they ban an account or an IP and the like...

there are countless websites, and software products for sale, that do geographical IP lookups for you, they have hit an miss accuracy depending in the way they arrive at their conclusions...

i am glad the Geolocation Protocols are being resisted so far by the internet in whole... i wonder for how long though...

try out Flagfox if you are interested in this stuff... or google "geographical ip lookups"... tons of results...

 

I guess the real question is:

Why do you want to know?

Answer this would aid in the answer. I mean if you want to know how to trace down an individual based upon their IP, then as others have mentioned. The likelihood is you (as an individual) won't be able to do that, The police *Might* be able to (If they can deal with the legislative tape across international boundaries) and the ISP's certainly do help when asked to (Unless they are rogue, but most of those operations are a flash in the pan because their exploits get noted quickly)

Most of the time any information to identify an IP's location requires a certain amount of cross referencing. (Social Engineering)

You can do a WHOIS after a Reverse DNS lookup which will usually give a small amount of information (The information entered here however can be falsified to an extent, but this doesn't mean the ISP's that "Contract" a particular domain don't have the real details. It's likely they do because otherwise they couldn't have a legally binding contract and would allow themselves open for exploitation.)

You could have a number of pings sent from locations on the network that you know the GPS locations of in the real world. This allows you to work out the Latency of communications to work out a rough idea for distance, however factors have to be taken into account like the Speed of the equipment available and the contention of the network as well as the number of hops your ping has to go through to register a response.

Obviously people can use Proxies, however again certain countries have certain laws that are suppose to be followed and could result in penalities. For instance one might be if you run a Server online you have to keep it's connection logs (Both incoming and outbound) for at least Six Months. This is so any legal investigation isn't impeded by not having evidence to investigate with. (Currently the Cybercrime circuit has been using international boundaries to slow down any legal action under the basis that each territory they operate through requires a certain amount of time for any legal action to be taken, and if the evidence is sketchy prior then it's likely no legal action can be taken and therefore currently has meant some crimes had been easy to get away with. Obviously this is however changing and is why some people will bitch and complain about the Freedom of the Internet and various concerns of posed regulative bodies)

 

I work for an ISP and was technical support for 2 years before moving on to a different role. Each of the times I was asked where someone was (only 3-4), I declined to provide the information, and the general policy was that the request would have to come through law enforcement. ISPs can tell exactly who has the IP address, just like Stryder said, but they will not provide the information as it violates the privacy of the other user.

 

Thanks for all the help.
Stryder: I just want to know how to do it. I knew that it probably isn't possible to find the address, but I was hoping that you guys come up with smart ways to narrow down the possibilities of where the IP is located, that I hadn't thought of yet....
Idle Mind: So do all employees have access to this information? What about address information from other ISPs? "general" policy seems to indicate that there are exceptions to the rule. Makes me wonder....

Mabuse: thanks for telling me about flagfox

 

Not all employees know how to use the tools, nor have access to them. So no. It's really just general account info. IP addresses aren't really a private thing like a phone number or street address would be. We cannot see the information of other ISPs, only our own clients.