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Show HN: IP Guide – Info on IP addresses, Networks, and ASNs

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Show HN: IP Guide – Info on IP addresses, Networks, and ASNs

#1

Post by bswinnerton »

Hey all, wanted to share my recent weekend hack project. I wanted to improve upon the existing space for looking up information about IP addresses and ASNs.

The backend is written in Rust and pulls BGP data every 8 hours from the RIPE RIS project to build up a routing table and also adds geolocation information. The frontend is using React and Tailwind.

Would love any feedback or suggestions on what to improve.

Show HN: IP Guide – Info on IP addresses, Networks, and ASNs
ip.guide

Re: Show HN: IP Guide – Info on IP addresses, Networks, and ASNs

#2

Post by joshghent »

Great site and product! Congratulations on the launch.

I actually have a use case for this in my product Loginllama. I need to grab information about the IP addresses. I’m currently using a different API but don’t really like the product.

Is it rate limited or have any key authentication? My email is me at joshghent.com if you want to chat about this more.

Re: Show HN: IP Guide – Info on IP addresses, Networks, and ASNs

#3

Post by bswinnerton »

joshghent wrote: post #2

Great site and product! Congratulations on the launch. I actually have a use case for this in my product Loginllama. I need to grab information about the IP addresses. I’m currently using a different API but don’t really like the product. Is it rate limited or have any key authentication? My email is me at joshghent.com if you want to chat about this more.

Go for it! There's no formal rate limiting or auth, but it does start to load shed at 2k concurrent requests. It's stateless, so it's very easy to scale horizontally after that.

LoginLlama looks super helpful, what else would you like to see from IP Guide to help? Would a boolean attribute on whether or not the IP is a known tor exit node be helpful?

Re: Show HN: IP Guide – Info on IP addresses, Networks, and ASNs

#6

Post by DougN7 »

Having a simple paragraph about RIPE, BGP and ARIN would be helpful (at least for me).

Is there any way at all to do this for IPv6?

Additional info that would be helpful would be if this is hosted by one of the big tech companies (i.e. is it on AWS, Azure, etc), though maybe that will show up in the network info?

If the IP is associated with hostnames that would be nice to know. Not sure how much of a one-stop shop you want to be :)

Re: Show HN: IP Guide – Info on IP addresses, Networks, and ASNs

#8

Post by LelouBil »

DougN7 wrote: post #6

Having a simple paragraph about RIPE, BGP and ARIN would be helpful (at least for me). Is there any way at all to do this for IPv6? Additional info that would be helpful would be if this is hosted by one of the big tech companies (i.e. is it on AWS, Azure, etc), though maybe that will show up in the network info? If the IP is associated with hostnames that would be nice to know. Not sure how much of a one-stop shop y…

> Having a simple paragraph about RIPE, BGP and ARIN would be helpful (at least for me).

Same, I've always wondered how do websites like this get their information.

Re: Show HN: IP Guide – Info on IP addresses, Networks, and ASNs

#9

Post by bswinnerton »

DougN7 wrote: post #6

Having a simple paragraph about RIPE, BGP and ARIN would be helpful (at least for me). Is there any way at all to do this for IPv6? Additional info that would be helpful would be if this is hosted by one of the big tech companies (i.e. is it on AWS, Azure, etc), though maybe that will show up in the network info? If the IP is associated with hostnames that would be nice to know. Not sure how much of a one-stop shop y…

> Having a simple paragraph about RIPE, BGP and ARIN would be helpful (at least for me).

That's a great idea. I'll add a tooltip over some of the less obvious fields describing what they are.

> Is there any way at all to do this for IPv6?

Indeed! It's supported natively, so if you have an IPv6 address you should see it automatically. Here's an example https://ip.guide/2600::>

> If the IP is associated with hostnames that would be nice to know.

I dig that idea, I'll have to think of the best way to pull that data while keeping the app stateless and fast.

Re: Show HN: IP Guide – Info on IP addresses, Networks, and ASNs

#10

Post by bswinnerton »

LelouBil wrote: post #8
DougN7 wrote: post #6

Having a simple paragraph about RIPE, BGP and ARIN would be helpful (at least for me). Is there any way at all to do this for IPv6? Additional info that would be helpful would be if this is hosted by one of the big tech companies (i.e. is it on AWS, Azure, etc), though maybe that will show up in the network info? If the IP is associated with hostnames that would be nice to know. Not sure how much of a one-stop shop y…

> Having a simple paragraph about RIPE, BGP and ARIN would be helpful (at least for me). Same, I've always wondered how do websites like this get their information.

Great feedback, I'll add a little more to the site to describe how it all works. Until then...

At a 30,000ft view, the site works by building an in-memory routing table at boot time that has an entry for every route on the internet and which ASN (autonomous system number) announces it. From there, it stitches together data on the organization that the ASN belongs to, and geolocation data, and then exposes it in the API/UI. Under the hood it's using a treebitmap[1] data structure, which means that it can do _very_ fast lookups when given a particular ip address or ip address range.

Zooming in a little more, the main data source is MRT dumps from the RIPE RIS project[2]. There are a number of routers that RIPE (one of the 5 regional internet registries that hand out ASNs and IPs) that rely on network operators to share their view of every route on the internet. These routers are probably some of the most well-connected routers in the world. For the purposes of this service, MRT dumps are effectively a point-in-time snapshot of the routing table of that router. IP Guide parses that file, rebuilds it in memory, and attaches other relevant data to each IP range (also known as a "prefix").

This allows the service to stay fast and stateless, which was one of the main things I was trying to optimize for when building it.

[1]: https://blog.apnic.net/2021/06/04/storing-and-retrieving-ip-... [2]: https://ris.ripe.net/docs/10_routecollectors.html

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