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Lately I've been tracking a spammer on craigslist. I recently discovered that he's added a new technique to his arsenal, he registered a whole bunch of domain names but they all resolve to the same ip address.

Is there any way to take an ip address and get a list of all the domain names that resolve to that ip?

Janak
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4 Answers4

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Oh, actually you can. After all, if there are companies constantly indexing the whole www, or even making a "backup" of it, why wouldn't be possible to index information about domains and IPs?

There are some free services that do that: You provide a public IP address, and you get a list with the domain names that resolve to it.

This can be quite useful for several purposes. Tracking a spammer seems to be one of them.

I don't know how accurate, current or complete is the information that these services provide, but they have helped me in dealing with situations like the one you described.

Undo
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mfriedman
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This will be very difficult because the data you are looking for is spread in the DNS-records/servers for these domains. Only the webserver on which the site/mail is hosted on knows which domains it should respond to.

WowtaH
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You cannot easily find all the domains that point to an IP address. There are a couple reasons for this:

1- You are looking for all forward lookups that return this IP address. There is no way to get this information (you would have to look at every domain).

2- Reverse lookups (using PTR records) do not have to match all forward records.

> most rDNS entries only have one PTR record, DNS does not restrict the number if they are needed.

3- There is no query function that aggregates the data. I think there was an old, obscure query that was eventually removed because the size of the internet made it too slow.

benc
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You can try reverse DNS, but I'm not sure whether it will list all the domain names. If it won't then I don't know of any other way to do this.

svick
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  • Reverse DNS will only allow one record per IP-address – WowtaH Jul 01 '09 at 14:05
  • I'm no expert on this, but according to the WP link I provided, it is possible to have more than one record per IP adress, but not usual. – svick Jul 01 '09 at 17:51