User:Blastwizard/vandalfight

Vandal fighting

Disugusted by some of the vandal editing either because of their abusive character (racism, personal attacks, ...) or just because they undermine the reliabilty and quality of the articles in Wikipedia. I decided to go on war with the vandals. Here are the tools I'm using and I invite people to do the same. It is always a good thing when vandals think they can hide behind their IP address to trace it back and usr the vandalip template. Three ways of tracing an IP address, the simple one is to use the utility whois, which is normally on the command line of all Linux machines. syntax is: whois -h This will give you the address and name of the service provider. The next tool I use is traceroute, another common tool on UNIX machines. syntax is: traceroute This will give you the path between your machine and the machine of the vandal, maybe useful to identify or localise the vandal. The third tool I use is nmap, it is a port scanner not very nice way of doing it but very efficient. Very good at reverse DNS and tells what ports on the vandal machine are open can help to check wether it is an innocent machine that has been hacked. Unfrotunately, nmap in its most useful functionalities needs root privileges which is not very good practise in general. As nmap pings the machine and can stay forever if the machine scanned is down or ping is filtered it can be good to ping the machine first and if it doesn't reply use the option -P0 with nmap.