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Show HN: Which-cloud, what cloud does an ip address belong to?

by BenjaminCoe on 6/4/16, 4:43 PM with 9 comments

• by ereyes01 on 6/4/16, 10:56 PM

  This code seems to rely on IP ranges and whois lookups, which won't work if you're running on a network / VPC that has no internet access

  Some clouds provide a metadata api accessible via a link-local address. These are accessibly regardless of what network your instance is in.

  AWS Metadata API: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-insta...

  GCE Metadata API: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/metadata

  Azure Metadata API: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/what-just-happened-to...

  This library only appears to support detecting AWS/GCE/Azure, so perhaps trying URLs in each metadata API with no / minimal timeout is a more robust way of accomplishing this instead of relying on whois, and could provide the same functionality as is currently supported in the library.

  The downside of this approach is that maybe some clouds/VPS's don't have metadata APIs accessible in this manner. Maybe this doesn't work for some more obscure services, if you want to be super comprehensive.

• by pyvpx on 6/4/16, 9:02 PM

  what does this add instead of using whois?

• by ers35 on 6/5/16, 3:36 AM

  See also: The Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit shows the ISP based on the AS number from which the IP address is announced: http://bgp.he.net/

  Example: http://bgp.he.net/ip/104.196.27.39