Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.Problem/Motivation
IP Addresses are a common, standard "thing" displayed in the administrative UI that cannot be altered consistently.
Proposed resolution
Create an 'ip_address' element #type for renderable arrays. Even if the base element type only returns an un-altered string, this paves the way for hook_element_info_alter() to inject a #pre_render that should address most use-cases.
Remaining tasks
Patch.
User interface changes
None.
API changes
API addition of a new element type for IP Addresses.
Original report by @bertboerland
I would like to see a link from the statistics page from the Source IP address of the host that was logged to a configurable whois / online nslookup site. For example 145.222.1.2 towards ripe. Or maybe even beter -but with some OS depencies- using a local whois / nslookup client.
Comments
Comment #1
ricabrantes CreditAttribution: ricabrantes commentedI think this feature are Interesting, any news??
Comment #2
kbahey CreditAttribution: kbahey commentedThe feedback module already has code that does that, which we can steal.
It relies on prefixing the IP address with "whois.domaintools.com" and getting a lot of info on the IP address.
Comment #3
Dave ReidThis is outside the scope of core.
Comment #4
bertboerland CreditAttribution: bertboerland commentedso blocking an IP address is fine to have in core, so any newbe admin will block google, but putting an a href around it isnt?
Comment #5
Dave ReidCan you personally guarantee the service will always be available and never shut down for the life of the Drupal project? If not, we probably shouldn't link to it.
Comment #6
Dave ReidPlus, if #381802: Have theme_username() show hostname for anonymous users if available lands we should be able to make a small contrib module that makes whos links for IP addresses when used as 'usernames', which is most of the cases in core.
Comment #7
bertboerland CreditAttribution: bertboerland commentedNo, *I* cant. but this the whois service, the reverse -so to speak- of dns on the internet. the net can work without the whois protocol.
But you are right, linking to an external source for 3 years that we dont control has its drawbacks
and I made another mistake, the delegation of ARIN to different whois servers is in the whois protocol if you use a good command line tool (the same as it is in the dns protocol with delegation) however, this works for the whois client, not for the weclient
So if we look for 145.222.1.1 in arin, we have to scrape the result https://ws.arin.net/whois/?queryinput=145.222.1.1 looking for ReferralServer: whois://whois.ripe.net:43 and then do a http://www.db.ripe.net/whois?form_type=simple&full_query_string=&searcht...
This is undoable and hence we should not add this option this way, unless someone knows a webservice that is the autority of the data (hence arin) that is complete or does redirect on http level toward the right service.
so, unless someone knows the solution without scaping, this feature requst can indeed be closed.
we might however put something in the help text about reverse looking up IP addresses to make sure what and who you are blocking
Comment #8
bertboerland CreditAttribution: bertboerland commentedone additional remark though, instead of a whois, we could do a "Do you want these IP addresses to be reversed" (with better wording :-) and let the webserver perform a reverse lookup on the listed IP addresses. Or show the name wehn hovering over the address. Not enabled by default, since reverse lookups can be time consuming
drawbacks
1) this only works if the webserver is not behind a outbound firewall that blocks abound 53/udp
2) many ip addresses will not resolve
3) many names are not usefull for endusers/admins
4) 10.1.2.3 may reverse to host.example.com while not being part of example.com
5) as stated http://php.net/manual/en/function.gethostbyaddr.php is slow
6) we need to take special care for ipv6 addresses
but rething about this, it would be nice to hover over an ip address and have a "please wait" hovertip and then the reverse as well in the hoveripe
and /or, when you click "block 10.1.2.3" show the text "are you sure you want to ban 10.1.2.3 (foo.example.com)? [yes|no]"
this seems a better solution then a whois and is very doable I think by using a gethostbyaddr function
Comment #9
kbahey CreditAttribution: kbahey commentedI am not hungup on tying this to a particular service, and yes, it is a concern if they are not there tomorrow or change their URL.
But we need a way to allow overriding the rendering of IP addresses, so we can hook into this or that service.
Perhaps a theme function is the best way here, and we can render the IP address any way we wish.
Comment #10
thedavidmeister CreditAttribution: thedavidmeister commentedI'd suggest not a theme hook, due to performance considerations when rendering many IP addresses on one page. Maybe a render element type that could have a #pre_render attached?
'#type' => 'ip_address'
Comment #11
jhedstrom