It's really interesting to find out where your favorite sites are located. For example, I opened a command (DOS) window and typed the command:
tracert putYourFavoriteSiteHere.com

What was interesting is that this particular site eventually led to a data center in Dallas, finally connecting to a soft-layer.com host and when I googled, that host was actually located in Washington, DC!
(Of course, the joke in my avatar is just a coincidence, ha ha)
I'll be Darned!??
Happy Hunting.

(I wonder if this thread will be banned also? let's see)



[edit on 15-10-2008 by ATS4dummies]

It's funny, after having posted on ATS for some time now, I've received quite a bit of traffic to my own website from government and military agencies. Nearly everything I post on here is hosted on my own webpage.

I just checked today and I've already got a hit this month from ns.dia.mil (Defense Intelligence Agency). Earlier this year I got a number of hits from defuep02a.defence.gov.au (Australian Dept. of Defense).

It just proves to me agency folks visit ATS and subsequently check up on some of the people that post here.

edit: my post didnt make sense sorry its late/early


[edit on 15-10-2008 by MurrayTORONTO]

You are going to get a majority of them going to Texas and Florida. Most places don't keep their servers in house, and instead co-locate them to other places where bandwidth has bigger pipelines and is more abundant/cheaper.

The interweb works in mysterious ways...but not too mysterious.
Sometimes you'll get funny stuff happening depending on the situation.
Take my home cable for example. Some sites I browse have little apps that identify where you are coming from and present custom information tailored to you based on your perceived geographical location(typically dating ads) and in my case, it thinks I'm in a town over 100 miles away.
Users coming from AOL used to always appear to come from IP addresses based in Virginia regardless of where they signed on from.
This is where people start talking about proxies and hiding your true location from the places you visit.
Likewise, you can augment a server's perceived location in many ways using redirects, frames and other such methods.
Another anomaly you may run into is finding that lots of companies appear to be located in Delaware...something about business registrations that I haven't bothered to really care about, but if you wanna register a business, Delaware seems to be the place.
Another thing to watch out for is the WHOIS contact information for domains and IP addresses.
One of my earliest ISP functions was performing domain registrations and modifications for clients. I remember a fair number of domains had either outdated or incorrect contact details. Seems that once a person registers their domain, there is little incentive to keep the contact details updated...even less so nowadays as everything is pretty much based on an email address, user ID and password. As much as ICANN and Internic hound domain owners, I would guess a decent fraction of domains and IP subnets still have incorrect contact information associated with them.
Often, the biggest hint about an IP address location is in the names of the routers.
My current IP address lists me as being 20 miles away.