Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] How does Wireshark do name resolution?

[Richard Brooks <richardbuk@xxxxxxx>]

I am writing an interface to Snort's MySQL database. The interface currently
uses nslookup to try and resolve ip addresses to their human friendly names,
but Wireshark is doing a much better job than nslookup. For example using
nslookup ip address '216.239.59.208' resolves to 'gv-in-f208.1e100.net',
however Wireshark correctly resolves this ip address to the much more
meaningful 'bskyb-pop3-ssl.l.google.com', which is much more descriptive
than the previous effort.

The Snort interface I am writing relies on addresses that look out of place
when resolved to their human friendly names. For example to help the user of
the interface spot addresses that are non-commercial (i.e. a hacker/zombie
machine rather than say 'www.amazon.com').

What makes things even worst, is than many times nslookup returns the likes
of 'The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was
found'.

If anyone has any ideas on what Wireshark is using to resolve ip addresses,
I'd be most grateful if they would let me in on it?

Regards
Richard