Markus

Afternoon/Evening,
I know it's possible to have multiple websites running from one IP address, each having distinctly different domain names.

Is it possible for someone to search that IP address and locate all the sites that are hosted on it? If so, how?

BuRR

www.iptools.com works for some websites.

stevencotton

No. You may be able to do a zone transfer against their DNS server, but only a badly configured DNS server will allow you to AXFR.

Markus

Thanks chaps, didn't think it would be possible, and it's a good thing that it's not really.

RichB

If it were possible, there would be a number of embarrassed ISPs out there...

BuRR

I've just re-read the question, and totally got the wrong end of the stick! lol

stevencotton

Why?

TopBanana

Hosting their sites on the competition's network maybe?

RichB

You could find out how few/many sites they have hosted...
Some hosts will say we dont host more than 100 sites per shared server...
Some will say they are bigger than they are.

You could also find out a hosting companies customers and spam all the other sites saying 'we are cheaper than this person' cos they'll know their hosting plans....

To name a few ideas....

stevencotton

Most of that information (apart from the hard sell which I didn't think of) is useless unless you also know what kind of hardware is running or they're advertising it as "N virtuals per physical host" (which is actually a worthless thing to say, since there's nothing wrong with mass vhosting, more vhosts != less performance, mod_vhost_alias for Apache is just for that), and customers pay for bandwidth. Security could be a problem though, if you can break through someone's poorly written code, gain shell access, to get at another site's info.

NotoriousREV

What about companies that host behind intelligent load balancing equipment? We host loads of sites behind fewer IP's than you expect and then break out onto multiple physical hosts beyond that. Unless you know the structure, you can't tell anything about the physical set-up. It gets even more complex when you include virtualisation across multiple physical servers...

stevencotton

Then any information that could be gleaned from a balanced setup would be incorrect, but the person doing the scan wouldn't know that.

Good job this isn't technically possible anwyay

RichB

The question was "Is it possible for someone to search that IP address and locate all the sites that are hosted on it? If so, how?"
thats all...

NotoriousREV

OK: No.