Finding a Culprit

Well… The kids are off to P.E. right now.  It’s nice to be sitting in a quite classroom.  After school on Saturday one of our teachers brought me some stuff she found on one of the school’s printers that wasn’t exactly school appropriate.  So to find out whom the culprits was I first had to find out which site it came from.  Luckily on one of the inappropriate pictures there was a water mark (text over the graphic showing ownership) that gave some sort of a web address, and there was a banner at the top of the page.  So I tried the site that was watermarked on the picture and it turned out to be a website for video games.  No porn there, or links to porn.  So I thought I was at a dead end until I started to examine the top of the page.  There was a site index, no links that gave the www. —–.com, but names.  So I goggled one of the names of the links and what do you know, I found the site in question.  So now I had the site, but how do you find out who has visited it you ask?  Well this morning I called up GCI School Access (our ISP).  They run our Internet filtering via a proxy.  So I told them my problem and they asked for the site in question, and he gave me an IP address.  Problem being it was MY ADDRESS.  Mine was the only one there, which was really confusing.  He did a little more looking and that I was the only one who typed in the entire address with the “www” at the beginning of the address.  The other users had just typed in the part of the address that followed the “www”.  So I now have a list of like 5 IP addresses to find.  To locate those I find an IP that is in use that is on the list.  Using my computer I ping that address (send out packets of info and bounce like radar).  While the packets are being sent our I go to the switch and unplug one connection at a time until the packets don’t go through.  That tells me what port the computer is getting its internet connection from.  Then I locate that switch and it is either connected to a computer directly or to a airport base station that is giving the connection wirelessly to a computer.  Once I find if I can have a talk with the class about appropriate computer use.  That’s my exciting news for now.  Looks like the kids are back from P.E.  Gotta go  🙂

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