Which software converts IPs into short form?

One of the key pieces of information required to work with IP address numbers, whether you’re looking at the magic number alone, or the full address assigned by your internet service provider, is the IP address in the form of a 30-digits-plus-one. There are other ways to do it of course, such as the DNS Protocol, but we’re interested in the formatted IP address, which would look something like this: 08:52:56:74:94:e3

Pronounced almost anything, but let’s see if we can get one of our hands on an example. The xResolver project has made this task easy, providing us with a decoder for the format.

In its own words, “The xResolver project aims to simplify working with IP-address numbers by providing a fast and open source C++ tool to encode IP-addresses to a human-readable string format (referred to as IP-address format) which can be applied to easily communicate their meaning to computers. xResolver is free and open source software (FOSS).”

This is a great project that deserves plenty of support and attention, so you can find out more by taking a look at the xResolver site, or take a look at xResolver’s README file and the xResolver source code.

In a related note, XDomainRouter also offers a line of networking appliances, which will happily handle this task for you.

More often than not, when dealing with technology, one can forget the human element, and while we’re not looking to take away our individuality, there is some benefit to using more simplified language. Remember, if you think someone is being difficult, the language they are using may be impenetrable to you, so you can always fall back on the default English phrase.

As you can probably tell from the other posts in this week’s edition of News and Announcements, there is a lot going on around the open source world at the moment. Take a look at our weekly roundup of news stories to see if there is something of interest to you.

It is great to see the release of xResolver 3.3.1 as we can now be sure it will not go out of support before 2018, which is great news.

For your convenience, we have linked to an easy to use chart to display the IP addresses in use. The location of the actual map is specified by clicking the URL in the tooltip for that particular range.

If you would like to browse the current range for your region, the location is specified by clicking the region in the list.

Have you ever wondered how much you use the IP Address generated by your internet service provider? Then take a look at this map, which shows how many IP addresses are currently active in your region.