Puzzle for the week

Bill Ott bott at grpl.org
Thu Apr 18 11:07:50 CDT 2002


They're obsessive-compulsive about a wild ass guess?  Because that's 
what WebTrends is producing.  All you have is the IP address or host 
name of whatever made the request.  This could be a proxy server across 
the country from the user.  I believe WebTrends even states something 
like, "...these stats should not be considered accurate, but only give 
an impression."

Sure, you could write something, maybe using Net::Whois and parse 
through the results, but you could use 'rand' to pick the data and end 
up with the same degree of accuracy...  

My home IP address (in Wyoming, MI) is registered to AT&T in Middleton, NJ.
It's really not possible to get "good" data based on the client address.

If you still want to try, here are some suggestions:
http://www.private.org.il/IP2geo.html


Brandon Gohsman wrote:

> Hey everyone,
>
>  
>
> Here is a brain teaser for anyone who's interested:
>
>  
>
> I have a client who saw a feature in a web log statistics program and 
> now wants it on their site (in an obsessive-compulsive way). One of 
> the many WebTrends packages for web hosts determines what state (if in 
> the US) that a visitor is in. Early on in the development of this 
> client's site, we used a demo of WebTrends to analyze their log file. 
> Among the gaggle of info it returned was the state that the web 
> request originated in.
>
>  
>
> So why don't we just use the WebTrends program? Because the site is 
> hosted by Verio and they won't install it (even if we pay for it). 
> Which means that, in order to use it, we need to download the log file 
> and run it on our machine to get the info. And the log file can get 
> very, very large. This is not a good solution. And although the client 
> adamantly wants this feature, they aren't willing to switch web hosts 
> to get it.
>
>  
>
> So I am charged with the duty of trying to figure out how WebTrends 
> does what it does to get that one tidbit of info. At this point, I can 
> only guess that it takes the domain name/IP address and finds contact 
> info or billing info, pertaining to that address, to get the state. I 
> can't conceive of a way to get that info from any other piece of data 
> in the access.log. I need to figure out exactly how to work backwards 
> from the limited info in the log file to determine the visitor's state.
>
>  
>
> Here is a typical line from the access log:
>
>  
>
> bgp930234bgs.brmngh01.mi.comcast.net - - [18/Apr/2002:01:01:32 -0400] 
> "GET /CutOutArt6.swf HTTP/1.1" 200 5779 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; 
> MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)"
>
>  
>
> I know that it is possible to do reverse DNS lookups on a domain name 
> to get the IP address and visa versa.  I don't know how or if it will 
> get me any closer to solving my problem.
>
>  
>
> Have any of you ever had to do this or have a clue about where I would 
> begin?
>
>  
>
> Danke,
>
>  
>
> Brandon Gohsman
>
> Humble Librarian
>






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