At Least the Directories are Active (30/01/2012)

I may be struggling with my house situation, but life trundles onto.

I’ve been building my web application at work, which I’ve really been enjoying doing. It’s great to be totally in control of a project and just fix it however you like.

However, I’m writing it in ASP.Net, which is a language I don’t really know that well.

Today I a discovery. If the DNS is set up correctly, you can get the asset number of the machine that’s connecting to the webpage.

Assetnumber = System.Net.Dns.GetHostEntry(Request.ServerVariables(“REMOTE_ADDR”)).HostName

This is brilliant. It’s something I didn’t think you could do. But the header data contains the IP address, and if you do a Reverse DNS lookup, you can get the asset number.

Of course, it’s the full domain name, so you have to trim a bit off the end, but that’s easy:

Assetnumber = UCASE(LEFT(Assetnumber,INSTR(Assetnumber,”.”)-1))

Once you can do this, the possibilities are quite exciting. It means you know who the user is, and what computer they’re on, so you can really tailor the results back to them.