IP question

[adderslj]

One for the techies out there - how do you get the IP address that a URL represents?

Nigel Ogden - Barwick Green - Moonlighting on Lincoln Cathedral Organ

Comments

[blacksnail.livejournal.com]

Use the "ping" command, I'm not sure where that would be on a Mac. If OSX I bet you could get to a prompt, type "ping [URL]" and you'd get the IP address.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Pinging won't always work because a lot of servers are set up to not respond to a ping - it's often the first step in a Denial of Service attack.

You're better off using one of the online DNS services, but remember that there isn't a 1-to-1 relationship between servers and URLs - several websites could be hosted on one server (and thus have the same IP address) or a large enough domain (bbc.co.uk or google.com, for example)will be load-managed over several servers.

http://www.dnsstuff.com/ might help, as might http://www.bankes.com/nslookup.htm

[fraserspeirs.livejournal.com]

On OS X, there's a "Lookup" tab in Network Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Network Utility.app), although the output may take some interpreting.

On the other hand, open Terminal and type:

nslookup www.apple.com

which will give you slightly more terse output.

[kit-hartford.livejournal.com]

You could try this too.