This short article will help you in finding out your IP – WAN IP and LAN IP. I also made a video about this, on my YouTube channel. As usual, you can find it at the end of this article.
Your WAN IP, aka the one your PC or network used to connect you to the internet, can be easily found by going to a website like whatsmyip.org. It is also called a public ip address.
Your LAN IP, is the local address. Is the unique IP at that moment, of your device inside your network, can be found by right-clicking start -> click run, type cmd, hit enter, and type ipconfig. The ipv4 address is in most cases your LAN IP. The gateway is sometimes the IP of your router or network equipment you’re connecting to.
Why does my computer have two IP’s?
You most probably have ‘two’ IP’s because your PC is connected to a router/modem and it is the one connecting to the internet. Apart from connecting to the internet it also needs to assign some addresses to the connected devices. So it knows who’s who – routing traffic – hence the name: router or modem with router capabilities.
So if your router or modem has the IP 192.168.0.1, it’s attached devices will probably get IP’s like 192.168.0.2 .3 .4 and so on. It needs to do this so it knows where to send/receive traffic from.
And here’s the video version:
While you’re here, did you see my article about hiding your IP address?
You might also like my article about ports in networking.
