How can I create a GUI interface using Visual Basic to track an IP address?
2 Answers
It's pretty easy to use VB.NET Visual Basic as application "glue" to interface with or read from a source of IP protocol addresses, such as a webserver access log. The program can be used to take the raw source of data and then process it into some format that is much more easily visualized, such as grouping IPs into the number of times they accessed a resource, or perhaps grouping IPs into class C addresses and then doing the same quantity calculation.
Using this aggregate data, the GUI Interface could do things such as mapping the IPs onto their geographic locations, as described in Are there any online databases where you can enter an IP address, and it will tell you which company uses that IP address? , and then plotting them onto a map visualization, or possibly traceroute'ing the IPs of interest and plotting the location of every hop along the way to the geographic location of the IPs.
By using a clustering algorithm, the geographic locations of the IPs can be aggregated like data points in order to identify if there is possibly an area of interest with regards to the IP dataset used. For example, a large number of accesses from an AWS web service cluster could be aggregated into a number of IPs, traced back to a small geolocation indicating that a west coast datacenter was used in accessing the site. Again, such an algorithm could be implemented, though slowly, in Visual Basic.
Alternatively, Visual Basic is really not needed when all you really need to do is to play around with some awk scripts to aggregate the data directly from the access logs, but it doesn't make for nearly as dramatic an episode.
Using this aggregate data, the GUI Interface could do things such as mapping the IPs onto their geographic locations, as described in Are there any online databases where you can enter an IP address, and it will tell you which company uses that IP address? , and then plotting them onto a map visualization, or possibly traceroute'ing the IPs of interest and plotting the location of every hop along the way to the geographic location of the IPs.
By using a clustering algorithm, the geographic locations of the IPs can be aggregated like data points in order to identify if there is possibly an area of interest with regards to the IP dataset used. For example, a large number of accesses from an AWS web service cluster could be aggregated into a number of IPs, traced back to a small geolocation indicating that a west coast datacenter was used in accessing the site. Again, such an algorithm could be implemented, though slowly, in Visual Basic.
Alternatively, Visual Basic is really not needed when all you really need to do is to play around with some awk scripts to aggregate the data directly from the access logs, but it doesn't make for nearly as dramatic an episode.
