Question

How to elicit user’s information when he/she is visiting your website?

• IP Address
• Mac Address
• User Profile Name
• OS Name
• OS version
• OS Registered to (Name/Company)
• Computer Name
• Browser Name
• Browser Version
• ISP Name/Internet Connection Provider Name
• Connection Type
• Location – City/Country (based on IP)

Answer 1

The answer to most of what you’re asking is either ‘impossible’, ‘impossible with javascript, use ajax to get it from the server-side’, or ‘parse the user string’ (which can always be spoofed).

• IP Address: You have to use a serverside language. If you need it dynamically, you can get it from an AJAX call. In PHP, it’s $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']
• Mac Address: Not available, except very very rarely if the user is using IE and has poor security settings.
• OS, OS Version: You can get it by parsing the User Agent String. A script like this can do it pretty robustly: http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html
• OS registered to: Impossible.
• Computer Name: Impossible.
• Browser Name, Browser Version: You can get it by parsing the User Agent String. A script like this can do it pretty robustly: http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html
• ISP: You’ll need to use some kind of 3rd party database for querying who owns an IP. Or, you can call a command line ‘whois’. In PHP, that would look like shell_exec("whois $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']"); that would return the whois record for that IP address, which you can parse to get an ISP.
• Location: You’ll need to use some kind of 3rd party tool to associate an IP address with a general region. (something like this: http://ipinfodb.com/ip_location_api.php)