Lab Exercise 1

Created Wednesday 16 September 2020

Today, we will work on and consider some tools for discovering information online. The questions given to you today are *purposefully broad* — I want to work on them with your group to the best of your ability — along with the practice it gives you, it will help me gauge what knowledge and skills you already have. Since you will have time to work in class, you may privately ask me questions if you're stuck. (Note that questions such as "Do you know how to..." are sincere — i.e., if the answer is no, that's fine — ask me during class and then please note that in your response, I will give help and you will NOT be penalized). This is a team exercise, but please only confer with your own team and/or me for now.

Questions that must be specifically answered are numbered and in bold, like this.
Terminal Commands for you to use are in monospace/preformatted like this.

Part I - Your IP


As you can (hopefully) see by now — the "IP Addresses" reported by each of your team members' virtual machines is different when you run the ifconfig command. Consider the following:


"Your EXTERNAL IP Address may be different from your local reported one"

  1. Explain what the above means, and why.
  2. Have each team member, figure out what *this* address is. Is it the same for everyone?
  3. Explain how your team accomplished this, with reference to named sites or resources if applicable.
  4. Do you know how to accomplish the above only in the command line? If so, let me know.
  5. Give a possible/likely physical location of the above. How did you do it?

Finally, on the command line, try
traceroute <your external IP>

  1. What are we looking at here?

Part II - More IP Stuff


  1. IP addresses are Four numbers separated by periods, in the range of ZERO to WHAT? What's the significance here?
Lets try something. Knowing the above, try finding information about a RANDOM IP address. Pop open a terminal. First, type the following:

range=<WHAT>
(Substitute the number answer for <WHAT> above)

Then on the next line, type (or copy and paste, can the VMS even do that? I don't know...)

echo $(($RANDOM % $range)).$(($RANDOM % $range)).$(($RANDOM % $range)).$(($RANDOM % $range))

Haha, so cool.

8.To the best of your ability, explain how that echo thing works.

Remember in bash, if you want to run this again, you can just press up arrow/enter.

Try to do this a few times until you get one attached to a company, preferably perhaps a non-computer related company. If you don't get anything interesting, again, just message me and I'll provide one.

  1. Give me some details on the IP ADDRESS you found..e.g. owner and location
  2. Again, try Traceroute here — Can you tell me anything about the path this is taking?
  3. Next, see how much more info on this COMPANY or ORGANIZATION you can find. Obviously there can be a lot, but at a minimum:
- Name
- Location
- Incorporation Location (may be different)
- Agent or other human being attached to the company

Part III - Email


Finally, let's repeat something like this with Email. I'm not going to give a lot for you to go on at FIRST, but I want to see how you all tackle the following without my help. If you get stuck, I'm available.

  1. See if you can find and trace the true origin of a spam email you may have.

If you don't have one (weird) I can provide one.

This will involve
- figuring out how to see an email's "header"
- determining what parts you can and can't trust
.. and more.

Please provide the header (I don't need the content) as well as your best guess.

  1. Optional but helpful — How hard was all of this for your and your team? Did you discover or learn anything interesting/useful along the way?


Backlinks: FSU Courses:LIS4774