VoriTools

Look up an IP address or domain name

Enter an IPv4 address or a domain name: the server resolves it and reads the location for that range from an offline database. City-level entries are approximate and cannot identify a person or a street address.

How to look up an IP address or domain name

The workbench resolves an IPv4 address or a domain name on the VoriTools server and then reads the entry recorded for that address range in a database that ships with the site. Nothing is sent to a third-party lookup service, so the answer does not depend on somebody else’s rate limit.

The table shows the resolved IPv4 address, its decimal value, the address type and a city-level location. The line below it reports your own connection IP the same way, next to the operating system and browser your request announced.

  1. Enter an IPv4 address such as 8.8.8.8, or a domain name such as example.com. A name is resolved by the server’s own resolver, and only the first A record is shown.
  2. Press Look up, or press Enter. The address changes to /ip/<value>.html, so the result can be bookmarked or sent to somebody else.
  3. Read the resolved IPv4 address and the decimal value: the decimal value is the same address written as one 32-bit number, which is what ip2long() and many log formats use.
  4. Check the address type before you treat the result as a reachable host. Private, loopback, link-local, shared, multicast, documentation and reserved ranges are not routed on the public internet.
  5. Read the location as a network entry, not as a device: a city name applies to the whole range, and private or reserved addresses have no public location at all.

What the result means, and where it stops being reliable

Where the location comes from

VoriTools uses the DB-IP Lite city database (CC BY 4.0), refreshed from the monthly release and stored as a single file on the server. Each lookup is a binary search over that file, so a result arrives in about a millisecond and no query leaves the machine.

That also sets the update cadence: an address block handed to a new network between two monthly releases is still listed under its previous owner. The country and the region are usually right; the city is the registered seat of the network block.

Why an IP location is approximate

An address is a single 32-bit number, and the database stores one place per range. A VPN endpoint, a mobile carrier’s NAT pool or a CDN edge can answer from a city hundreds of kilometres away from the person using the connection.

Use the country and the region for coarse decisions such as which datacentre to route to or which language to answer in. Do not use the city to decide whether a visitor may see something, and never treat this page as a search for a person.

IPv4 only, and failures are named

The workbench answers IPv4 addresses and domain names. An IPv6 literal is refused with a message instead of being echoed back as an unresolved name, and a name with no A record reports that nothing could be resolved.

Values are checked before the request is built, so spaces, quotes, control characters and URLs are rejected instead of being pasted into the page or into the redirect header. The answer is a snapshot of DNS and of the database revision — check it against your own tools before changing a firewall rule or a DNS record.

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