What can you do with an IP?

[erucader]

If someone visited my site and I were to track their IP address, how much use could it be to me? Besides doing a whois lookup and finding their ISP can it help to track someone down?

[mairving]

It usually doesn't do all that much good. A good portion of IP addresses are dynamic and change anyway. It would be good information to have if someone tried to hack your site but not a lot of good otherwise.

[doctorgonzo]

Originally posted by erucader Besides doing a whois lookup and finding their ISP can it help to track someone down?

Yes, it can help track somebody down, but you would need the help of the ISP to match the IP address to a particular user. Other than that, an IP address isn't worth much. Doing a tracert may give some indication as to the physical location, based on whether the intervening routers have descriptive names, but that's about it.

[glc]

It's really only good for getting demographic info, as in where your visitors are coming from.