An Interesting Thing Happened on the Way to...

...honoring the user who was responsible for my site achieving its 5th gigabyte of transfer. I got the IP address from my log files and started researching the IP to try and mention on my blog who it was and what they were downloading when the milestone occurred, thinking it would be something silly like a little piece of the page they were loading. The interesting thing is that I got stonewalled. Everything comes up unknown. I even tried a traceroute, which got caught in one particular IP address that just kept hitting itself instead of going further, and I couldn't get anywhere near the target IP address. All I do know is that it's part of a block owned by Verisign.

Oh well. They were listening to God-honoring stuff, so maybe God will glorify Himself in it, whatever it involves.

Has anyone else run into this kind of thing before? Should I start looking for black helicopters?

Tracking down individuals by IP is rather difficult. There are so many layers, network interfaces, proxies, firewalls, NATs and other contrivances that frankly what ends up in your transfer / access logs are largely useless.

It's not uncommon to run into dead ends in this fashion, I shouldn't worry about it if I were you.

Thank you, Sir.