How can I determine which company an IP address belongs to?

.net dns whois
Brann picture Brann · Jun 23, 2009 · Viewed 13.2k times · Source

I'm trying to programmaticaly determine the company* associated with a given IP address.

My first guess was this :

  string hostname = Dns.GetHostEntry(IPAddress.Parse(ip)).HostName;

but this won't work if the reverse DNS isn't set correctly, which seems to happen 90% of the time.

However some websites are still able to successfully determine the company associated with a specific IP even if the reverse dns fails. For example, on this site, the ISP Provider field sometimes contains valuable information (ie the name of the company) even if the hostname isn't set.

What's the easiest way to achieve the same thing using .net ?

Notes :

  • I don't need a canonical name. ie MS or Microsoft are both ok.
  • I'm targeting big companies, which are likely to "own" their IP address ranges.
  • I'm running on Windows, so unix's whois tools are not installed by default.

Edit regarding the use of whois : Sometimes, there's no whois information associated with an IP

Answer

Martin Beckett picture Martin Beckett · Jun 23, 2009

You can install the whois command line tool for windows from microsoft

edit: then what information are you looking for ?

>whois bbc.co.uk
Domain name:
    bbc.co.uk

Registrant:
    British Broadcasting Corporation

Registrant type:
    UK Limited Company, (Company number: 000057)

Registrant's address:
    Research & Development
    Kingswood Warren
    Tadworth
    Surrey
    KT20 6NP
    United Kingdom

Registrar:
    British Broadcasting Corporation [Tag = BBC]

Related questions

Get IPv4 addresses from Dns.GetHostEntry()

I've got some code here that works great on IPv4 machines, but on our build server (an IPv6) it fails. In a nutshell: IPHostEntry ipHostEntry = Dns.GetHostEntry(string.Empty); The documentation for GetHostEntry says that passing in string.Empty will …

Read More
Get domain name

My computer is in a Domain (Active Directory) and I need to get the domain name dynamically. I found the following code on the internet: SelectQuery query = new SelectQuery("Win32_ComputerSystem"); using (ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(query)) { foreach (ManagementObject mo …

Read More
How to get mx records for a dns name with System.Net.DNS?

Is there any built in method in the .NET library that will return all of the MX records for a given domain? I see how you get CNAMES, but not MX records.

Read More