Get server ip address in php

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

gethostbyaddr — Get the Internet host name corresponding to a given IP address

Description

gethostbyaddr(string $ip): string|false

Parameters

The host IP address.

Return Values

Returns the host name on success, the unmodified ip on failure, or false on malformed input.

Examples

Example #1 A simple gethostbyaddr() example

$hostname = gethostbyaddr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

echo

See Also

• gethostbyname() - Get the IPv4 address corresponding to a given Internet host name
• gethostbynamel() - Get a list of IPv4 addresses corresponding to a given Internet host name

lukevb_at_iafrica.com ¶

19 years ago

Sometimes when using $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] OR $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] more than 1 IP address is returned, for example '155.240.132.261, 196.250.25.120'. When this string is passed as an argument for gethostbyaddr() PHP gives the following error: Warning: Address is not a valid IPv4 or IPv6 address in...

To work around this I use the following code to extract the first IP address from the string and discard the rest. (If you wish to use the other IPs they will be in the other elements of the $ips array).

if (strstr($remoteIP, ', ')) {
    $ips = explode(', ', $remoteIP);
    $remoteIP = $ips[0];
}

Hope this helps someone :)

king dot macro at gmail dot com ¶

17 years ago

The problem of broken DNS servers was causing me a problem because i had a page for user statistics that required around 20 reverse dns lookups to be done, and even as many as 5/6 of them being broken was causing a huge delay in loading the page. so i wrote a function that uses a UDP socket to talk directly to the DNS server (instead of going via the normal gethostbyaddr function) this let me set a timeout.

The only requirement is that your DNS server must be able to do recursive lookups, it wont go to other DNS servers if its told to... and of course you need to know your DNS servers IP address :-)

function gethostbyaddr_timeout($ip, $dns, $timeout=1000)
{
    // random transaction number (for routers etc to get the reply back)
    $data = rand(0, 99);
    // trim it to 2 bytes
    $data = substr($data, 0, 2);
    // request header
    $data .= "\1\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0";
    // split IP up
    $bits = explode(".", $ip);
    // error checking
    if (count($bits) != 4) return "ERROR";
    // there is probably a better way to do this bit...
    // loop through each segment
    for ($x=3; $x>=0; $x--)
    {
        // needs a byte to indicate the length of each segment of the request
        switch (strlen($bits[$x]))
        {
            case 1: // 1 byte long segment
                $data .= "\1"; break;
            case 2: // 2 byte long segment
                $data .= "\2"; break;
            case 3: // 3 byte long segment
                $data .= "\3"; break;
            default: // segment is too big, invalid IP
                return "INVALID";
        }
        // and the segment itself
        $data .= $bits[$x];
    }
    // and the final bit of the request
    $data .= "\7in-addr\4arpa\0\0\x0C\0\1";
    // create UDP socket
    $handle = @fsockopen("udp://$dns", 53);
    // send our request (and store request size so we can cheat later)
    $requestsize=@fwrite($handle, $data);

    @socket_set_timeout($handle, $timeout - $timeout%1000, $timeout%1000);
    // hope we get a reply
    $response = @fread($handle, 1000);
    @fclose($handle);
    if ($response == "")
        return $ip;
    // find the response type
    $type = @unpack("s", substr($response, $requestsize+2));
    if ($type[1] == 0x0C00)  // answer
    {
        // set up our variables
        $host="";
        $len = 0;
        // set our pointer at the beginning of the hostname
        // uses the request size from earlier rather than work it out
        $position=$requestsize+12;
        // reconstruct hostname
        do
        {
            // get segment size
            $len = unpack("c", substr($response, $position));
            // null terminated string, so length 0 = finished
            if ($len[1] == 0)
                // return the hostname, without the trailing .
                return substr($host, 0, strlen($host) -1);
            // add segment to our host
            $host .= substr($response, $position+1, $len[1]) . ".";
            // move pointer on to the next segment
            $position += $len[1] + 1;
        }
        while ($len != 0);
        // error - return the hostname we constructed (without the . on the end)
        return $ip;
    }
    return $ip;
}
?>

This could be expanded quite a bit and improved but it works and i've seen quite a few people trying various methods to achieve something like this so i decided to post it here. on most servers it should also be more efficient than other methods such as calling nslookup because it doesn't need to run external programs

Note: I'm more a C person than a PHP person, so just ignore it if anything hasn't been done the *recomended* way :-)

Vincent ¶

3 years ago

I discovered that gethostbyaddr sometimes returned the same host name with some uppercase letters in it and sometimes with all lowercase letters.

example:

d54c34fa1.access.example.com
d54C34FA1.access.example.com

This is probably not the fault of gethostbyaddr, but this can be a problem when comparing or storing, because it will give two entries instead of one.

A simple solution to this is to use strtolower on the host name.

Matt AKA Junkie ¶

18 years ago

Since my little ISP thing isn't globally acceptable, here's an update.

function getisp($ip='') {
    if ($ip=='') $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
    $longisp = @gethostbyaddr($ip);
    $isp = explode('.', $longisp);
    $isp = array_reverse($isp);
    $tmp = $isp[1];
    if (preg_match("/\<(org?|com?|net)\>/i", $tmp)) {
        $myisp = $isp[2].'.'.$isp[1].'.'.$isp[0];
    } else {
        $myisp = $isp[1].'.'.$isp[0];
    }
    preg_match("/[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}/", $myisp) ? return 'ISP lookup failed.' : return $myisp;
}
?>

phalkon at nospam dot home dot com ¶

21 years ago

Be cautious when looking up many hostnames.  If your DNS server is slow to respond, you may have to pump up your Max execution time for your scripts, otherwise, it will timeout.  I found that even 3 unresolvable hosts can cause a 30 second delay in processing.

tom ¶

16 years ago

Be careful with the usage of this function - it will slow down a server to a crawl if called a lot and the slowness won't be reflected in any of the obvious places, like CPU usage, apache requests, SQL etc. When you do use it make a special note of where!

oryan at zareste dot com ¶

16 years ago

If all else fails, but you have shell access, Unix/Linux servers can use this for a timeout response:

shell_exec('host -W 2 0.0.0.0');

Where 0.0.0.0 is of course the IP, and '2' is the number of seconds for the timeout.  This returns a more detailed string of info, with some additional text which might vary depending on the system, so if you want a string with the hostname and nothing else, you'll have to do some substring cutting.  There should be an equivalent of 'host' for Windows users to execute, but it isn't my platform.

Anonymous ¶

1 year ago

There is 1 bug in gethostbyaddr_timeout() function that king dot macro at gmail dot com posted in the most important line of all, setting the timeout with socket_set_timeout(). It should be:

@socket_set_timeout($handle, intdiv($timeout_ms, 1000), $timeout_ms % 1000);

I'd also make the $dns parameter last and optional and parse it from /etc/resolve.conf (or something else) if not given.

abe at abe2k dot net ¶

19 years ago

gethostbyaddr() doesn't seem to be able to resolve ip6.int
(ipv6) adresses, so I made a function that can, and works
just like the normal gethostbyaddr().

You need dig and ipv6calc, dig should come with most
distributions, if not, install bind from http://www.isc.org.
ipv6calc can be found at http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/ipv6calc/index.html.

function gethostbyaddr6($ip6) {
  $ipv6calc = "/bin/ipv6calc";
  $dig = "/usr/bin/dig";
  $file = popen($ipv6calc." --in ipv6addr --out revnibbles.int ".escapeshellarg($ip6), r);
  $ip = fread($file, 128);
  pclose($file);
  if ((substr($ip, 0, 5) == "Error") || (!$ip)) return "Address is not a valid IPv6 address";
  $file = popen($dig." ptr ".$ip, r);               
   while (!feof ($file)) {
    $buffer = fgets($file, 128);
    if (substr($buffer, 0, 1) == ";") continue;
    $buffer = explode(" ", $buffer);
    if ($buffer[3] == "PTR") {
     $host = substr(trim($buffer[4]), 0, -1);
     pclose($file);
     return $host;
    }
   }
  pclose($file);
  return $ip6;
}

echo gethostbyaddr6($_SERVER[REMOTE_ADDR]);

elpmille at indiana dot edu ¶

20 years ago

I previously used something very similar to what posted but found it to be quite tedious for getting the 'nicehost'. This method below is a lot cleaner, and it also works for numeric addresses.

function nicehost($host) {
    if (ereg('^([0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}$', $host)) {
        return(ereg_replace('\.[0-9]{1,3}$', '.*', $host));
    } else {
        return(ereg_replace('^.{' . strpos($host, '.') . '}', '*', $host));
    }
}

Stuart Macdonald ¶

12 years ago

Here's a simple function that uses Dig to obtain the hostname for a given IP address. If no hostname can be found it returns the IP again.

Works only on linux / unix, or whatever other platform with dig installed as a command line utility.

    function tryGetHost($ip)
    {
        $string = '';
        exec("dig +short -x $ip 2>&1", $output, $retval);
        if ($retval != 0)
        {
            // there was an error performing the command
        }
        else
        {
            $x=0;
            while ($x < (sizeof($output)))
            {
                $string.= $output[$x];
                $x++;
            }
        }

                if (empty(

robbakAgmail_com ¶

14 years ago

it appears that gethostbyname() fails if the domain name contains unicode. Example:

$ host 10.10.10.128
128.10.10.10.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer PC-de-S\130bastien.flexi.robbak.com.
$ php  
echo gethostbyaddr( '10.10.10.128' ); ?>
10.10.10.128

gethostbyaddr is listed as unicode compatable in version 6, so a fix may be in the works.

james at trnxs dot net ¶

11 years ago

You should be careful in the use of $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'], as I discovered, once using Amazon AWS's Elastic Load Balancer's, this value may be a comma separated list of IP addresses and will thusly not compare as conceived in almost every example I have seen posted by users in the comments.

dhjdhj at gmail dot com ¶

11 years ago

I have observed that there are problems with all approaches that use the existence of an IP address to verify that the name being looked up actually exists.

If you're using opendns, then a request to a non-existent server returns an IP address anyway, the address being one for an opendns server. This is process is presumably in place so that errant URLs in browser requests take you to a "legitimate" page, i.e, the openDNS website where they can notify you of a problem.

Unfortunately, that mechanism seems to occur for ANY non-existent hostname. Appending a single period to the hostname does not seem to help.

pulstar at mail dot com ¶

19 years ago

If you need to store an IP addresses in a database, you can convert and store it in an INT type column (4 bytes). The functions below can convert IP addresses to its integer decimal value and vice-versa.

function ip2dec($ipaddr) {
  $base=explode(".",$ipaddr);
  $decimal=(double) $base[0]*16777216;
  $decimal+=$base[1]*65536;
  $decimal+=$base[2]*256;
  $decimal+=$base[3];
  if($decimal>2147483647) {
    $decimal-=4294967296;
  }
  return (int) $decimal;
}

function dec2ip($dec) {
  if($dec<0) {
    $dec=(double) 4294967296+$dec;
  }
  if($dec>16777215) {
    $ip=$dec-(intval($dec/256)*256);
    $dec=(double) intval($dec/256);
  } else $ip="0";
  if($dec>65535) {
    $ip=($dec-(intval($dec/256)*256)).".".$ip;
    $dec=(double) intval($dec/256);
  } else $ip="0.".$ip;
  if($dec>255) {
    $ip=($dec-(intval($dec/256)*256)).".".$ip;
    $dec=(double) intval($dec/256);
  } else $ip="0.".$ip;
  $ip=$dec.".".$ip;
  return (string) $ip;
}

andy at occ dot nu ¶

21 years ago

if the user is sitting behind a proxy server, you can do this;

    if ($HTTP_SERVER_VARS["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"] != ""){
        $IP = $HTTP_SERVER_VARS["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"];
        $proxy = $HTTP_SERVER_VARS["REMOTE_ADDR"];
        $host = @gethostbyaddr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]);
    }else{
        $IP = $HTTP_SERVER_VARS["REMOTE_ADDR"];
        $host = @gethostbyaddr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS["REMOTE_ADDR"]);
    }
?>

ps; i use $HTTP_SERVER_VARS["something"] instead of just $something;
you can get most of the $HTTP_SERVER_VARS by just using there $something equivalent, see the manual for that (preserved variables)

Mark in Sussex ¶

11 years ago

If you use gethostbyaddr() with a bad IP address then it will send an error message to the error log.
If you don't want your error log file getting too big then first check that the IP address is valid.

In the following example I first check if the IP number starts with a number,
if not then don't use gethostbyaddr('..')

  $IP = "BadValue.123.123.123";
  if(intval($IP)>0){
    $ServerIP = gethostbyaddr($IP);
  } else {
    $ServerIP = $IP; // A bad address.
  }
?>

marco[DOT]ceppi[@T]seacrow[DOT]org ¶

12 years ago

Anonymous has a good point (though I don't agree with pushing to execution to shell unless I have to. However this is a faster example (explode then loop is a little too intensive for a simple check)

function gethost ($ip)
{
    //Make sure the input is not going to do anything unexpected
    //IPs must be in the form x.x.x.x with each x as a numberif( preg_match('/^(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)(?:[.]
(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)){3}$/', $ip) )
    {
        $host = `host $ip`;
        return (($host ? end ( explode (' ', $host)) : $ip));
    }
    else
    {
        return false;
    }
}
?>

Though to be honest I would use:

function gethost ($ip)
{
    return ( preg_match('/^(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)(?:[.]
(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4]\d|1\d\d|[1-9]\d|\d)){3}$/', $ip) ) ? gethostbyaddr($ip) : false;
}
?>

reinhard at ess dot co dot at ¶

17 years ago

tried out some of the examples below, but no one worked for me.
(
"host" returns something if domain-name wasn't found
"gethostbyaddr" has a too long  timeout when it fails
"the udp-example" returns some strange characters...
)
so i have changed the "host"-example a little bit. hope someone can need it. (maybe with little changes like without error-description)

function gethost($ip)
{
   $host = `host $ip`;
   $host=end(explode(' ',$host));
   $host=substr($host,0,strlen($host)-2);
   $chk=split("\(",$host);
   if($chk[1]) return $ip." (".$chk[1].")";
   else return $host;
}
?>

grimNOSPAMtraffic at hotNOSPAMmail dot com ¶

19 years ago

If you have found the host of the ip, the shortest way to cut it not to display the full hostname to the public would be:

$host = substr($host, strpos($host, ".") + 1);

P.S. strpos() can also be easily used if you want to put "*" for every simbol you ommit, like so:

$os = strpos($host, ".");
$host = substr($host, $os);
$host = str_repeat("*", $os) . $host;

--McTrafik

ven at PragaKhan dot com ¶

20 years ago

$REMOTE_HOST or $_SERVER['REMOTE_HOST'] will give you the reversed ip IF apache is setup to do hostname lookups.

HostnameLookups On

alexey at ozerov dot de ¶

20 years ago

This function seems to be very slow on IIS 4.0 Server (Win32). I use system call to NSLOOKUP instead to get PC-Hostname:

unset ($execoutput);
exec ("nslookup $IPAdresse 2>nul",$execoutput,$nslookstatus);
if (isset ($execoutput[3]) && ereg ("^Name: *([A-Za-z0-9]{2,})\.",$execoutput[3],$regs))
$nslookname=strtoupper($regs[1]);
else $nslookname="Unknown";

Note by members: This is not portable to Windows platforms. so you would be better to stay with our function.

billyblue ¶

14 years ago

I just spent a dickens of a time trying to figure out why my gethostbyaddr's were simply failing halfway through.

I'm returning a log of page visits, and with each new IP, I wanted to pull the hostname of the IP. On each report page, I'm pulling 500 lines from my Db, but only maybe 25 IPs on average. Sometimes this report would generate in under 15 seconds, other times it would fail with a connection reset.

It turns out that several of the IPs in my Db looked like this: x.255.x.x. gethostbyaddr really hates that and simply dies when it reaches one of these IPs.

For my case, I purged the Db and prevented the logging of IPs that contain 255.

webmaster at askapache dot com ¶

13 years ago

Here is a simple function I compiled from user-notes that works great.. any improvements?

function get_ip( $host ){
  $hostip = @gethostbyname( $host );
  $ip = ( $hostip == $host ) ? $host : long2ip( ip2long( $hostip ) );
  //echo sprintf("Resolved %s to %s", $host, $ip);
  return $ip;
}
?>

www.ad-rotator.com ¶

19 years ago

For ad-rotator.com, we need to do a lot of IP lookups, gethostbyaddr is very easy get timed-out and the script stucks there forever. Here is a fail-safe alternative, 1 sec max for timeout per IP.

function ar_gethostbyaddr($ip) {
  $output = `host -W 1 $ip`;
  if (ereg('.*pointer ([A-Za-z0-9.-]+)\..*',$output,$regs)) {
    return $regs[1];
  }
  return $ip;
}

Matt AKA Junkie ¶

18 years ago

Going through numerous tests, the following results are concluded:

// If you're using a server on Windows, this is faster
function getisp($ip='') {
   if ($ip=='') $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
   $longisp = @gethostbyaddr($ip);
   $isp = explode('.', $longisp);
   $isp = array_reverse($isp);
   $tmp = $isp[1];
   if (preg_match("/\<(org?|com?|net)\>/i", $tmp)) {
       $myisp = $isp[2].'.'.$isp[1].'.'.$isp[0];
   } else {
       $myisp = $isp[1].'.'.$isp[0];
   }
   if (preg_match("/[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}/", $myisp))
      return 'ISP lookup failed.';
   return $myisp;
}

// If your server is on a *nix system, this is faster
function gethost ($ip) {
$host = `host $ip`;
return (($host ? end ( explode (' ', $host)) : $ip));
}

// be warned, however, that gethost() will issue a warning
// if safe mode is on with the use of backticked variables

?>

stephane at metacites dot net ¶

20 years ago

gethostbyaddr_with_cache()

As someone truely said upper in the forum, some unresolved addresses may slow down your script to the point it times out.

Althought I had thought gethostbyaddr() would use some kind of cache, it doesn't seem to when the IP is unresolved (at least on my win machine).

So, I've coded a little gethostbyaddr_with_cache() function that will greatly speed your page if you have many gethostbyaddr() to perform on the same page.

function gethostbyaddr_with_cache($a) {
  global $dns_cache;
  if ($dns_cache[$a]) {
    return $dns_cache[$a];
    } else {
    $temp = gethostbyaddr($a);
    $dns_cache[$a] = $temp;
    return $temp;
  }
    }

jz at NOSPAM dot nplu dot kiev dot ua ¶

19 years ago

Just to fun that gethostbyadd() returns server machine name known in LAN rather then its DNS if I try to call it against my own host (from workstation), whether it would local (behind the proxy) or global (of proxy itself) IP or just loop 127.0.0.1.

And thus you can get LAN names of other workstations by its intranet IPs (I mean smth like 192.168.0.???)

Fun :)

dominique at vdx dot nl ¶

19 years ago

To convert an IP to a numeric value, just use the ip2long (...) function.

Vice versa; use: long2ip (...)

inny at core dot fetchnet dot org ¶

20 years ago

Turning on the HostnameLookup function on in the apache configuration file will severely increase the loading times of all the pages serviced by the httpd-server.
It's mostly a better idea to just use gethostbyaddr($REMOTE_ADDR); instead of $REMOTE_HOST if you turned HostnameLookups On, unless you want the hostnames specified in apache's log file...

webmaster at script-tease dot net ¶

18 years ago

gethostbyaddr() tends to lag on various systems for whatever reason. Here are two functions that should prove their worth speedwise.

// For Linux...function gethost ($ip) {
$host = `host $ip`;
return (($host ? end ( explode (' ', $host)) : $ip));
}// For Win32...function nslookup ($ip) {
$host = split('Name:',`nslookup $ip`);
return ( trim (isset($host[1]) ? str_replace ("\n".'Address:  '.$ip, '', $host[1]) : $ip));
}
?>

Pretty basic, but it should get the job done.

nothanks at nospam dot com ¶

20 years ago

This is also very useful if you'd like to ban these annoying people that keep spamming your forums. It requires a clever use of mySql but can be great:

First, make a table for the bans, then make the query:

"SELECT banReason from tBans where '". gethostbyaddr($REMOTE_ADDR) ."' LIKE banMask"

If your results aren't null it means his host matched a banMask in your DB, so you can redirect him with header() to a banned.php page and prevent him from accessing any content on your page!

kriek at jonkriek dot com ¶

19 years ago

In response to god at weaponzero dot f2s dot com: I found this much easier to write.

    $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
    $fullhost = gethostbyaddr($ip);
    $host = preg_replace("/^[^.]+./", "*.", $fullhost);
?>

IP address | Host:

You can still protect the IP of your visitors and only show the hostname or show them both.