Brassy dot net

This particular aspect of networking/computer affects everyone with a network. It's so unbelievably necessary for anyone who deals with networks (at any level) to understand. I cannot stress this enough! :) That said, so many people have serious problems with it and I can kind of understand why. Every single site I've seen goes into the detail straight away with binary arithmetic. Yes, binary arithmetic is how you work these things out, but are these people doing this binary arithmetic in their head when they know a /26 has a subnet mask of 255.255.255.192? Well, yes and no.

I wrote a piece previously regarding some geolocation theory.

Now the theory is all well and good, but it can get a little bit messy. Different RIR's display whois information differently and you have to parse human addresses out.

The good people at webhosting.info have provided everyone (yeh, even you!) with a list of every single netblock and where they think (read: educated guess) an IP is located.

This is a small introduction into a few small ways that Geo-location works. Places like 'Google' use geo-location to track down IP addresses and probably maintain internal databases. How do they get this information? How accurate is it? I'll try to answer these questions.