How to Find Your IP Address

Note: an IP address is not dedicated to your device, you may not have the same IP address today as you had yesterday e.g. if you are connected via a different router or if your own router has allocated you a new address.

IP Addresses

If your IP address begins with one of the following sequences, then it is a private IP address. This means you are behind a router that is using Network Address Translation (NAT).

If you have a private IP address then this identifies your position in the Local Area Network (LAN, basically your home network: router and everything attached to it). For everything in the LAN this is the address you need. The address used on the internet will have been allocated to your router by your Internet Service Provide (ISP) and is only required to be known when you are providing a service to external internet users e.g. if you have a web cam providing pictures to your mobile phone while away from your home network (we will talk about this in another howto).

From what is visible to our server:

Your LAN Internal IP address: not detected
Router's external IP address: not detected

Select your platform/operating system below for instructions on how to find the IP address in use by your device (normally this is the LAN internal IP address as shown above):

Windows
Apple iOS
Android

Windows

We will use windows 10 for our example but the procedure is pretty much the same for Windows 7 and above.

Windows: Network and Sharing Center

You need to look at the "Network and Sharing Center". You can access this through the "Control Panel" or by right clicking the "network connections" icon in the system tray. You should then see a page similar to that on the right (click on the image for a full page view, use the back arrow to return here).

Windows: WiFi Status

In the section "view your active networks" clicking on the link by "connections:" will give the pop-up shown to the right. For debug purposes you can use this screen to check that the byte counts for send and received data increase as expected.

Clicking on details will then give the following:

It is the "IPv4 Address" we are interested in. In this example it is 192.168.1.16. We can also gather the following informaton:

Note: If windows tells you that your IP address is 169.254.x.x then you have a problem. Windows uses this address (by default) when it exepects to be asigned an IP address by a DHCP server but the DHCP server cannot be found. This will occur if you cannot connect to a WiFi network properly or if you have a hardware/software problem between your windows system and the router. Check cables, try re-booting all components in the path to the router.

Apple iOS

We will use iOS xxx (iPad Air) for our example but the procedure is the same for all recent iOS versions.

iOS: Settings - WiFi

You need to look at "Settings". You can access this directly from the settings icon. You can tap on WiFi to bring up the settings page which should then be similar to the following:

By tapping on the connected network (ringed above), you will see this networks current settings, similar to that shown below.

iOS: WiFi - Active Network

The IP address is readily readable but we can also note:

Android V6.0

Method 1 (Works on Nougat, Marshmallow, Lollipop, Jellybean)

We will use Android Lollipop on a Nexus 10 tablet for our example.

Android: Settings

You need to look at "Settings". You access this by first swiping down the screen to bring up notifications and then a second time to bring up settings which you tap to select and which should look as follows:

By tapping on "About tablet" (or "About Device" mobiles) you should see a page similar to that shown below.

Android: About Tablet

Now tap on "Status" to bring the pop-up status panel into view, as shown below.

Android: Status

Two IP addresses are shown, a recognizable dotted decimal address and a colon delimited IPv6 address. IPv6 provides more IP addresses than our familiar IPv4 dotted decimal address and will become ever more important as the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes a reality. At the moment (2016) however, if you are using IPv6 addressing you probably don't need the information provided here. In most SOHO/domestic network environments your IPv6 address will never be used.

We cannot see much else about our network from this status display. We could assume our router will be at address 192.168.1.1 based on convention but we cannot be sure.

Method 2 (Gingerbread)

We'll use an old Samsung S2 mini with Gingerbread for this example.

Again we go through settings but then into WiFi settings rather than tablet/device status.

Android: Settings

When tapping on the active network connection be careful not to tap on the tick which of course turns WiFi off on your device, too late simply tap it again to turn WiFi back on.

Android: WiFi Settings

We can clearly see our IP address but again cannot see much else about our network from this status display. We could assume our router will be at address 192.168.1.1 based on convention but we cannot be sure.

 

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