I'm trying to determine if a certain anonymous message (which I have the IP address) came from my area. I'm in New Orleans, and for argument's sake let's say the IP address was 111.222.333.444 Thru some searching I found some blocks of 111.222.xxx.xxx in a New Jersey College, does this mean that more than likely that college owns the whole block of 111.222. or could all the way down in new orleans someone coudl be 111.222.yyy.yyy and New Jersey be 111.222.xxx.xxx?

Blocks of IP addresses are "owned" by ISP's. They can then assign any parts of that block to their customers. There is no real way to track an IP back, other than to the owning ISP, unless you have other ways to do this such as e-mail header information known to be good to compare against. And I doubt that a collage would pay for 65,000 Public IP addresses. Most would have a privet local network with a standard range of local IP addresses, and then a much smaller pool of shared Public IP addresses that are used when a local network user accesses the Public Internet through their main routers. If an IP block is assigned to an ISP's dial-up network, then the user can be anywhere in the world. There are ways to track an IP address back to its current head end router ID which sometimes give you a general location, but then again, a dial-up user could still be anywhere. Only the responsible ISP can track down the user of an IP address at any specific time, as most IP addresses are dynamic and change each time the user connects.

Try this Web site. http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl As JackG says, at best all it will tell you is which ISP owns that address. If its a local ISP fine. If its AOL or Hotmail could be anywhere in the world. However, depending on why you need to know, the ISP could trace that address it to its destination. They won't do it out of idle curiosity though. Probably require a request from a Law Enforcement Agency. Stuart

Thanks alot Stuart, the web site told me exactly what I needed to know. JackG, thanks also....according to stuart's website, looks like that University did get the whole 65536 block. It elimates what I thought was at least. Thanks for your prompt support! Dave