Re: Timezone analysis of IP addresses/Domain Names

On Wed, 12 Mar 1997 D.White@mcs.surrey.ac.uk wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Does anyone have any ideas on how to find country or geographical info or
> timezone info for an arbitrary domain name or IP address?
> 
> I'm trying to see if it's possible to perform a timezone-based analysis of
> our Web server logs, to see the distribution of accesses by timezone (and
> hence country).  The Web server logs record either the IP address or the
> FQDN of the requesting machine.  I've already assumed that I can look at
> FQDNs with country codes at the end, and use that to determine which country
> the machine's in.

[...]

> All these approaches are heuristics.  Does anyone know any more definitive
> mechanisms (or better heuristics!)?  Or should I forget the whole idea of
> analyzing the past, and maybe set up a form to ask people (with the problems
> of self-selection and randomness in sampling that causes)?

I believe that JavaScript (and for sure Java) has the capability of
reporting the local time.  I'm sure that with some creative thinking you
can find a way to use that to get a directly log of the local time a page
or possibly an image was accessed.  Put the resulting hack on your high
volume pages and start collecting your information. There are still some
sources of skew (primarily differential usage of NS/MS vs. 
non-JavaScript/Java capable browsers from country to country), but it is
about as good as you are going to get. You may be able to control for that
skew by doing a country code vs. user agent analysis of your logs.

-- 
Benjamin Franz

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 1997 19:20:29 UTC