One of the sad things about the Internet lately is the prevalence of spam not just in direct E-mail messages, but in chat rooms and boards, too. The webmaster of one music site I like tells me that he must delete between 30 (at minimum) and 50 junk ads a day.

Another music forum in which I participated was pretty much vacated when a spammer began plastering every thread with ads. I complained to the moderator that this fellow's IP address should be blocked –which, on reflection, was a dumb suggestion– but instead, the moderator began posting everyone's IP address, which completely killed all participation whatsoever.

Out of curiosity, I tried looking-up the spammer's IP address using my Mac's Network Utility. I entered the address – 125.33.152.110 – in Lookup, Traceroute, and Whois, and no information was produced other than numbers and abbreviations which were meaningless to me.

I told all this to a friend using Windows, and he immediately found the information at http://network-tools.com It seems that the spam was sent by someone living in Beijing, China, but since other examples of the same type of message come from a different IP address in a distant area of China, the computer in Beijing is likely a zombie robot hijacked to send spam.

So it seems that Lookup is pointless, but how do you get the Network Utility to work? If it's there, it should be at least as easy to use as the Network Tools site.

I don't really understand the point of your post.

The Network Utility is just a GUI interface on the command line utilities that are found on most Unix/Linux boxes. It would be nice if Network Security and Forensics was as easy as pushing a button named "Who attacked me" or "Who sent this SPAM" but it's WAY MORE Complicated than that. Hackers are pretty smart people and they know all too well about such utilities so they find ways of hiding who they really are like "IP Spoofing" and other techniques.

I've used Apple's Network Utility and have never had a problem. I don't always get all the information I want, but that's not it's intended use. It's just a another tool in your toolbox, among MANY OTHERS you should have.