How to find DNS IP and IP Location

Where is DNS resolving? Where is IP located?

Troubleshooting is fun if you are equipped with right tools and procedure. While doing web application troubleshooting (especially when it’s internet facing), one of the challenging tasks is to find URL IP, locations & ISP.

This becomes very crucial when you are having CDN (dynamic IP) or hosted applications at vendor site with multiple nating & floating IP. There are many ways to find this information but getting it quickly and accurately makes you smarter.

In this article, I will share online tools to help in finding 1) DNS IP address 2) IP locations.

So first…

Find out where is DNS resolving to

Let’s take a scenario that you found some URL, which is not connecting from your application and you need to find out URL’s IP address. If it’s internal URL then you can easily do nslookup and find the IP address.

Ex: nslookup internalurl.intra However, if it’s external URL and can’t do nslookup because your network administrator blocks it then you got to use online tools to find out. Here are two DNS record lookup tools, which you can use to find out A record of DNS.

1. DNS Watch

It’s my first choice to use DNSWatch to find out resolving IP & NS records. You can also use this tool to find out AAA, MX, NS, SOA, and TXT records. It’s very simple to use – access the following URL and enter the URL you wish to find out and click on Resolve.
URL: www.dnswatch.info

And you can see the results, it resolves to two name servers & two IP addresses.

2. View DNS

It’s online tool so there might be a situation where DNS Watch is not functional due to many reasons. That’s why I always keep this as a backup in my list. To use – access following URL >> Enter URL and click on GO.
URL:www.viewdns.info/dnsrecord/

So now, you know how to perform DNS record lookup to find out its resolving IP details.
Now the second one,

Find out IP location, ISP

This scenario could be very wide, some of the following.
Your application is accelerated with CDN like AKAMAI, etc. which resolves based on location and you need to find out particular IP location
You see unusual requests pattern in your application and would like to know IP location and it’s owner You would like to owner of particular IP address
There are plenty of tools, which can help you with this, however, here are two online tools, which I use and found very useful.

1. IP Location

It’s my first choice to use IPLocation to find out IP location and its ownership. To use, access following URL >> enter IP address and click on Query
URL: www.iplocation.net

As a result, you can see Geolocation data from IP2Location, IPLigence, IP Address Labs, DB-IP, IPINFO.IO, MaxMind. You see in one query you get results from various geolocation database. Isn’t it cool to get this information within second and that’s free!

2. IP2Location

A quick way to find out IP location, ISP, Domain with a limitation of 20 queries per day. You may consider this as a backup tool of IP Location.
URL:www.ip2location.com

We hope now you know how to find out DNS records lookup and IP geolocation details. This can be very handy if in supporting the Internet facing applications.