Ever found the situation where a friend wish to link to your home network, and you have no idea what your external IP is.
Do note that external IP Address is different from internal ip address.
An external IP address is an address, which can identify you on the world wide web and tell servers your regional location.
There are a few methods to do there
Method 1 to detect your external IP address
The easy way out is to go to website which can detect your WAN ip such as
http://checkip.dyndns.org/
https://canyouseeme.org/
https://whatismyipaddress.com/
2nd Way to Locate WAN IP Address issued by ISP by logging into router
This method will require some technical knowledge to get the information (external ip address) we want.
You are required to know your router’s IP address. If you are unsure, follow the steps below to find out.
- We will have to make use of command prompt to do that.
- Go to the start button (if u are using windows 7 or older OS) else, press “windows key + R” together on your windows 8 / 10 computer.
- Type in “cmd” without quotes and a black windows should appear.
- Type in “ipconfig” and information such as your IP Address, subnet mask, default gateway will appear. The IP address refers to the address that was issued by the router on your internal network (more of that in another post) while the default gateway address will generally be the router’s internal IP address.
- As shown in the image above, the default gateway address is 192.168.1.1 (your default gateway, router ip address might differs). For your reference, the PC ip address on the network is 192.168.1.15
- Type the address (192.168.1.1) into your internet browser’s address bar, the portion where you type in website address. Internet browsers refer to programs that allows you to surf the web, such as internet explorer, firefox, opera or google chrome.
- And a login screen, with the branding of the router, will greet you. Key in the login name and password. Typically default login credentials will be admin, administrator, root or password in any order.
When you managed to login to the page, go to the status page and check the WAN IP Address, it should tally with the address displayed using method 1.
** for more ways to open command prompt, check this link.
** If you are unsure of the login credential into the router, check with your ISP. Do not reset the router to reset the password as it could mess up network settings.
Check the link on how to find ip address of router in 1 min
Method 4 to find out your WAN Address (Not Accurate)
This method will be use a program called command prompt.
To fire up this program, go to the start button (if u are using windows 7 and older OS) else, press “windows key + R” on your windows 8 machine.
type in “cmd” without quotes and a black windows should appear.
type in “tracert google.com”
this is to trace the packet path that travels from your PC to the final destination which will be google.com
You can simply replace google.com with any website address.
Typically, the 1st IP listed will be your router internal IP (gateway) address. and the 2nd IP address listed will be your WAN address.