What does it do?

The Internet is annoying: you can't easily place any physical bearing on where people are. Mapper lets you see the geographical location with the latitude and longitude of almost any routed IP address.

How does it work?

When a network is connected to the internet, it is usually allocated IP addresses by the carrier ISP. These addresses are distributed by one of three organizations depending on the location of the network.

If you are in Europe, your IPs are allocated by RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeens), if you are in America, you will have IPs from ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) and if you are anywhere in the Asia Pacific, your authority is APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Center).

These authorities hold all sorts of information on all the networks registered with them (including the postal addresses).

What Mapper does is queries a database held by Caida Software. This database holds the geographical latitude and longitude of almost every city and town on the planet. So, once we know what town the network is in, it can give you the location with a set of coordinates.

The map image is then downloaded from a dynamic mapping service called MultiMap that can show a detailed map of any place on earth given a latitude and longitude.

Easy!

How do I use it?

In Net Tool Box, click "Mapper" on the toolbar. In the mapper window, type in the DNS or IP address of the target and click start. Providing you have a connection to the internet, Mapper will resolve the IP address and display it next to the host you entered. It will then attempt a NetGeo lookup via the database at Caida. Once it has completed the lookup, it will display all the information received in the area above the map. If the coordinates found are valid, it will then connect to MultiMap and download the map.

If you would like to view the map at a different scale, change the "Scale" meter on the top right hand side of the window.

During the lookup / download process, the status of each stage is displayed on the status bar.

Once you have the NetGeo results on the screen, you can quickly scan / query the host / network with other tools by clicking the arrows next to "Net IP Block".

Problems

The only real problem I've found with mapper is regarding some versions of QuickTime 4 which makes any downloaded maps all black. If this is the case on your machine, upgrade QuickTime at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

Occasionally you will find that mapper fails to finish a map download. I think this is a problem with the multimap servers, however I'm looking in to it.