There are many things you can do with an ip, such as ping, traceroute, etc...

You might wanna check out SamSpade

SamSpade is an integrated network query tool that includes ping, nslookup, whois, IP block whois, dig, traceroute, Finger, SMTP VRFY, web browser, keep-alive, DNS zone transfer, SMTP relay check, Usenet cancel, check website, download website, email header analysis Email blacklist query, Abuse address query, S-Lang scripting, Time. Each tool displays it s output in it s own window, and everything is multi-threaded so you don t need to wait for one query to complete before starting the next one. The output from each query is hotlinked, so you can right click on an email address, IP address, hostname or internic tag to run another query on it.