Later that afternoon, the mail grabber finished grabbing all the packet mail. The "Morris Limiter" I placed in the packet copying programs had been reached, and those programs went into a sleep mode. I looked at the count of received mail packets, and it was just under a million. That was a good supply of packets for the analysis program to take care of.
I looked at the computer running the analysis program. It was less than a third of the way through the packet headers. It would take a bit longer for it to run through all the packet headers. While that was running, I'd need to set up the lookup program.
But then I decided to get out of the apartment. I stopped the programs running on the computers, and shut them down. I packed them into the car, and made a quick stop out to the phone box outside to remove my phone connections. A quick replacement of the door lock, and a final check of the apartment, and I was out of there.
It took a short time to set up things at home. I started the packet analysis program, and it picked up where it left off. I then fixed a couple of peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches, got a big glass of cold milk, and went into the computer room to start setting up the lookup program.
Every IP address belongs to someone, either a company or an individual or a college or whoever. Any one entity can have multiple IP addresses. Each IP address has to be registered. You can easily look up the owner of an IP address by using a reverse DNS lookup. I'd need a program that would take the table of IP addresses and get the owner's name for each IP address. All the program would have to do was to access one of the main registration databases, query it with the IP addresses, and store the owner's name.
So I sat down, wrote the program (between bite of the sandwich), and tested it with a test IP table of about 300 addresses. I set up the program to query the databases in a batch mode, which would make it run a bit faster. And my high-speed connection to the Internet helped a bit. The program wasn't very fancy; it just needed to run through the list, storing the owner's name in a parallel table. The program worked OK with the test data, so all I had to do now was wait for the analysis program to finish. By that time, it was about half-way through the packet headers. Looked like it would take about six more hours for it to be done. So I took my plate and glass out to the kitchen, rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher. I was getting a little tired, so I decided to take a short rest.