Illuminati-R-Us

A website I visit relatively often is down.

I learn from another website by the same person that the server was hacked, and that he is working furiously to get everything working again.

What (other than asking - he doesn't seem all that responsive at the best of times, and he's busy right now) is the easiest way to find out if he's running his own server, or if he is hosted by some commercial outfit that might be hosting hundreds or thousands of sites on the same server?

There is a utility in Windows called "nslookup" (name server look up), run from the command line. I expect other OSs have a similar utility.

Look up the host name and get the ip address.
Then look up the ip address and get the server name back.
If you get the the host name back that you looked up, then it is a dedicated ip, and likely a stand alone server.
If you get a different host name back, it is a shared server.

Here's what it looks like for IRU, which is on a shared server:

C:\>nslookup
Default Server: UnKnown
Address: 192.168.0.254

> http://www.illuminati-r-us.com
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: illuminati-r-us.com
Address: 207.210.254.82
Aliases: http://www.illuminati-r-us.com

> 207.210.254.82
Name: host02.wpsuites.com
Address: 207.210.254.82

> exit

Apparently, the MacOS version of this utility is called - nslookup

It gave me what looked like a MAC address, but I got an IP address using ping, then put that in. That produces an error message, with a reference to in-addr.arpa and NXDOMAIN.

Hmm, no reverse DNS entry could indicate someone who doesn't know what they're doing, so a private server.

I don't know of a way to refine it more than that.

He’s got a temporary “we’re working on it” page up now.

Any update? Or has it gone the way of all things?

Heid the Ba wrote:Any update? Or has it gone the way of all things?

As I didn't mention the particular website in this 2.5 year old post, I have to guess about which one it might be.

If I am guessing correctly, it has been back up for some time.