See which dns addresses link to your ip?

Question

I have a server on an IP with one dns listing pointing to it. Is there any ways to see which urls are set up to go to this ip. Also, is there a way to prevent people from setting up dns listings that point to my ip?

Answer 1

Short answer: Not really.

While you can perform a reverse DNS lookup to see what your IP maps to, due to the way DNS works there isn't a way to directly take an IP and see what domains use it without resolving every domain you can find and logging its IP address(es) - which a few services have done - the downside of this technique is that it doesn't handle subdomains. So you can expect the data to be rather incomplete.

As to stopping someone from pointing a domain to your IP - no, you can't. I can register a domain, or create a subdomain and point it to any IPs I'd like, even if I have no control over those IPs.

A subtle form of protest that I see from time to time is people registering <company>sucks.com and using either CNAME or A records, and point it back to <company> - from a technical perspective, there's really nothing that can be done to prevent it (though there may be legal options).