What kind of IP address does whatismyip.com provide?
How can I get it using VB.Net code?
Also what is IP port?
Thanks
Furqan
PART 1
Okay, let's pretend you have a router in your house and that you have several computers in your house all connected to the internet through your router.
In order for the router to know where traffic goes on your network, it assigns unique IP Addresses to all computers on your home network (Usually beginning with 192.168.x.x). These IP addresses are local ip addresses, meaning only your router and computers/devices connected to it in your house knows about them. If you open a command prompt and do command IPConfig you will see the IP address that your router has assigned your computer.
So what is the IP address that WhatIsMyIP.com showing you? In much the same way that your router assigns addresses to all the computers on your network, your internet service provider hands out unique IP addresses to all of their customers. Now, because you have a router, the only thing the ISP can see on your network is that router and your ISP assigns an IP address to it. This is why routers are also called hardware firewalls, because people on the other side of it, can't tell how many computers or devices are connected to it.
What this means is, when you are visiting websites on the internet, the only IP address they see is your routers external IP address (the one assigned by your ISP). So no matter which computer in your house you use, the website wouldn't know the difference because all it can see is your router's IP address. Go ahead and try it; go to www.WhatIsMyIP.com on several different computers in your house. You will see that they all show the same IP address. However, if you did IPConfig in your command prompt on each computer, that shows you the local address your router assigned and it would be different on every computer in your home.
So, now that you understand the difference between local and external IP addresses, how would you retrieve your external IP address in VB or C# .net code that is running on your PC? Well the only IP address your computer is actually aware of is that local IP that we talked about. The only way you can see your external IP address is to go to a website that tells you what address the request came from (which would be your router's IP address).
What you would need to do is write up some code in your VB.net program that would navigate out to WhatIsMyIP.com (or some other website that can give you your IP address) and tell the code to grab it. I have written a web service located at http://www.u413.com/test/terminal/myip that returns only your IP address as the entire HTTP response. Find something similar though for your application because this little sample will not stay there forever; I only put it up there as a temporary example on a domain I already own.
Visit http://www.vbdotnetheaven.com/UploadFile/kbawala/WebRequestClass04182005054320AM/WebRequestClass.aspx to see how to make web requests from code running on your computer.
NOTE: You may not be aware of what DNS is either if you are unaware of how IP addresses work. Everything on the net has an IP address, including the servers that serve up website pages. But what a pain that would be, trying to remember up to 12 digit IP addresses for all your favorite websites. That is what DNS servers were invented for. DNS servers take a domain name (e.g. www.facebook.com) and translates it into the correct IP address. That way all you need to remember is facbook.com instead of 69.63.181.12 (this is facebook's IP address. Go ahead, try it! Put that IP in your browser's address bar and you will see facebook.), domain names are much easier to remember!
If you want to see the IP address associated with a website, open up a command prompt. Once the prompt is open type PING [websitedomain] (e.g. PING Facebook.com) and your computer will send 4 test requests to the address which is displayed for you.
PART 2
Let's pretend your IP address is like the address of an apartment buliding. The pizza delivery boy needs to know the address to the apartment building in order to deliver your pizza. But what is he going to do when he gets there? There are hundreds of doors/apartments to choose from. He needs to know the apartment number (port number on your computer).
Your computer has thousands of ports, and programs can listen on any one of them for requests from the outside world. When you go to a website almost all websites are served on port 80. Port 80 is the default port for web pages. When you go to facebook.com you are actually going to facebook.com:80, you just don't see the :80 because it is implied since it is the default. If I put up a web server, I could decide any port to serve websites on. If I served web pages on a different port than port 80, then you would have to include it in your URL. http://www.SomeDudesCustomWebServer.com:1337.
Outgoing requests use a port too, but that one is usually unimportant and your computer just picks one that is available. So when you go to Facebook.com, the facebook web servers are all serving up pages over port 80, but the port your computer opened up to send the request does not have to be port 80 because it picks an available port and then sends the port with the request. Then when facebook sends its response, it sends the reply back to the ip address and port that made the request.
Outgoing ports are only used for the duration of the request. Ports that must listen for connections must stay the same otherwise the computers making requests would have no idea what port to send the request to.
Easy huh!
Hope that helps you understand a bit better.
EDIT:
Port Forwarding
Okay, in light of the chat application you want to use/create, if you want it to communicate over the net you'll have to learn about port forwarding. Basically, because all you could see of your friend's network would be his external ip address, you will have to use that address to connect to his chat server (or vice versa if he is connecting to your chat server then it will be your external IP). Because of this, the connection request would only get as far as the router that has the external IP, but it would not know what computer on the network to forward the request to.
You will need to access your router's firmware and set up port forwarding so that the router knows to forward requests on a specific port, to a specific computer on the network. Visit http://portforward.com/ for more detail on how to setup port forwarding.
EDIT 2:
Firewall
When setting up stuff to communicate with your computer using your PC, you may start getting frustrated that it just won't connect. What is likely stopping you is your firewall. By default, most ports on your PC are completely blocked by the windows firewall. For each port that you want to communicate on you will want to go into the firewall and create a rule that will open up the port. Go here http://www.top-windows-tutorials.com/windows-7-firewall.html for a video on how to use the windows firewall. I did not watch it, but it is what came up first on a google search.
Do not simply disable the firewall. Even though this is an easy and quick solution to open up all your ports, you are leaving yourself open to attack. Viruses love to set themselves up in your computer if they can and listen on an open port for a connection from their beloved creator so he can obtain access to your PC. Only open the ports you need.
UDP vs TCP
When opening and forwarding ports you may notice that it asks for UDP (User Datagram Protocol) or TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). What they stand for may not make sense but all you need to know is this: UDP is for single packet transmissions which means that two packets sent by a pc may or may not be related to each other. These types of data packets are usually used for broadcasts on a local network. An example I would use is LAN games. When you host a game on a LAN the other computers/devices can see the name of the game and join it. That is because the computer hosting the game is transmitting a UDP broadcast across the entire LAN so that any devices can see the game. Those UDP transmissions usually contain the name of the game and the connection info required to connect to the game.
TCP is for continuous packet transmission. TCP requires an established connection, any packets transmitted on this connection are always related to that one connection/request. To continue my example from the last paragraph, once you click connect on the LAN game, your computer then establishes a TCP connection with the host and uses that connection for the duration of the game or games. TCP is the most commonly used connection type and your chat program would likely communicate over TCP, especially if you are connecting across the net because UDP broadcasts are useless across the internet. UDP is only really useful on a LAN.
You should be safe forwarding and unblocking only the TCP ports, but sometimes when I'm unsure I just do both UDP and TCP just to be safe. In fact, many routers and firewalls have 3 options: TCP, UDP, or Both which saves you from having to create two rules for both types of the port.
When in doubt, open/forward both.
What's my ip provides your IP v4 public address.
It's really easy to retrieve it, this topic explain how to proceed : How to get the IP address of the server on which my C# application is running on?
The code is only a few lines long, so the language (c# in this example) does'nt matter.
They provide your external internet facing IP.
This IP will depend on how you connect to the internet. If you connect straight from your computer to your ISP without any kind of router or firewall in between, it might be the same as your internal IP, but in most circumstances this will not be the case.
If you're at home and you've connected via a router of some kind, then you might be able to query it for the IP, but there is no standard way of doing this.
There is no standard way of getting hold of your external IP from the client it self. If you've got access to a server on the internet where you could deploy some code you could connect to that server from your client PC and ask it what IP you're connecting from.
IP Port Numbers
I also needed external IP using command line, but because I didn't find it I wrote small application using vb.net. You can use reflection for source code or ask on app home page for it. Basically application opens web page that provide your IP and parse it using regular expression, but because is designed with this purpose uses many "tricks" for this (can use more web pages at once, uses fastes page, etc). Check source for details.
Related
this might sound a bit amateur-ish but I'm in a bit of a situation here.
So I created myself a website and managed to get it working on localhost, I tried port forwarding ports 80,443 but nothing helped, So next thing I'm googling around and I read about ngrok and it actually worked. Got it working on a long randomly generated domain but the problem is that I want to use the one that I have from no-ip.com. How can I do that please? I'm very lost here.
Software being used: Xampp (Apache,MySQL)
I've reserved a DHCP ip-address for my PC in my router's settings, hopefully that helps? I don't know. Help me internet.
There are a whole bunch of possible reasons that this might not work. Here are a few of them.
Your ISP
Even if you have port forwarding set up properly on your router, it is still possible that you cannot do what you want.
First, many ISPs block serving websites from residential internet connections. Connections to port 80/443 will never even reach your router. You might try experimenting by forwarding a different port number (such as 8000 instead of 80) to see if the traffic can get through on that port. (However, that will not work as a practical solution since your users will not know to use an alternate port and your ISP can choose to terminate your service if you are violating the terms of your agreement.)
Second, due to the exhaustion of public IPv4 addresses, some ISPs are implementing Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT, a.k.a. Large-Scale NAT - LSN). Instead of giving your router a public IP address, they give your router a private IP address inside their network. Once again, connections to port 80/443 (or any other port for that matter) will never reach you. You can check if you are behind CGNAT by going to your router's setting and finding the public IP address, then going to https://whatsmyip.com/ and seeing if it is the same or different. (In theory, you should be able to tell that you have CGNAT if your router's IP address is between 100.64.0.0 - 100.127.255.255, but in practice some ISPs use other private network ranges too, such as 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255.)
The reason Ngrok works for you is because Ngrok opens a tunnel from your computer to their cloud servers and sends the traffic through that tunnel.
DNS
You mentioned in the comments that you have the DNS set to resolve the private IP of your computer. That certainly will not allow users on the public internet to get to your site, because they cannot connect to your address.
However, you also mentioned in the comments that if you change the DNS to point to your public IP, it doesn't work from either inside or outside. This could mean your problem is one of the ISP issues described above. It could also mean that your router does not support Hairpin-NAT (a.k.a. NAT Reflection), which is how the router would be able to redirect local traffic back to the local server instead of trying to send it out over the internet.
Firewall
Your computer's firewall can look at the source IP address of the incoming traffic, and it might be set not to allow external access to your web server. DO NOT DISABLE YOUR FIREWALL to try to get around this. Instead, you need to add a specific exception to the firewall rules to allow the incoming traffic. How you do this will depend on your operating system.
I am able to connect it if the two devices are in the same network but for example, if I use 4G on my android and turn of the wifi and try to connect to http://computer-ip-address then it just hangs and eventually errors out saying count not connect. The apache server is hosted in my local mac, and I've disabled my firewall temporarily. Any ideas on how to get a device using a different network to connect to my apache server on my local network?
You will need to configure your router so that it will forward port 80 from external to your mac.
Then, you can open http://your-public-Internet-ip on your mobile phone, effectively visiting your local web server.
If you don't like to remember your ip address, especially if you are on the go, the answer is dyndns or any free alternative, e.g. http://www.no-ip.com/services/managed_dns/free_dynamic_dns.html.
Using such a service, you will be able to enter http://yourname.service.com into your mobile phone. You will either have to configure your router to always tell this service your current IP (check your router for supported services) or run a tiny program on your mac which will handle this.
You need to enable port forwarding on your router to forward TCP 80 (and possibly TCP 443 if you are using SSL) to your web servers IP address.
Once done, you should be able to access your site via your routers public IP address.
Take note that of your web server is using a dynamic address provided by DHCP, your IP may change and this would stop it from working. I suggest you give your web server a static IP address to stop this.
You will probably have a dynamic IP on your router as well, so you can request a static one from your ISP or you can sign up for a dynamic DNS service.
If you post the model of your router, we may be able to give you more specific instruction on setting up port forwarding.
i hope your httpd.conf is set with port listening to
Listen 80
also, you can only access your site from your LAN otherwise, your server would need to be reachable from a public IP address, not a private one over an internet 4g connection, that means a diferent network
bonus points, if you try to reach your server from an external address, did you configure portforwarding on your router ?
If you could immediately and immediately connect to your localhost using your 4G network, then most likely anyone on the internet could do the same. It is important to understand that there are two components to the answer to your question:
Securing HTTP access (port 80 or whichever) from the internet. You probably don't want to open a wide door to your local network.
Configuring addressing from your client (in this case your phone) to your local computer (in this case your Mac). If the latter does not have a public IP address, then you will have to configure your client to hit your router instead, and to configure your router to forward accordingly.
Given that this is mostly system configuration work, I'm guessing that Serverfault would be a better place to find a satisfying answer.
I created an AMP web application that was originally going to be served from a traditional 3rd party host.
As we finished up, the client decided to host it internally, on a server in their office network. The application is only meant to be available to staff members, but those staff members will often be off-site. I had no involvement in setting up their network, which uses at least one server running windows server 2003. The client machines I saw were XP.
I set up Apache, MySQL and PHP on the server 2003 machine, and installed the application. The application is built on the CodeIgniter framework, so I set the base_url to the internal IP (192.168...), and we tested from within the network. Everything worked fine.
Next, we asked their network guy to open port 80 for apache. I set the base_url to the external IP, and tested from my home (using the external IP as the web address), and it works fine.
However, when attempting to access the application using the external IP from within the network, they're unable to connect. I can reset the base_url to the network IP, and they can access it using the network IP, but then it the application fails when connecting externally (since the base_url, used throughout the application, is pointing to the internal IP).
It suppose I could let CodeIgniter determine the base_url (by leaving the variable as an empty string), but would rather figure out why the external IP fails in-network, and try to correct that.
The server we're using is not dedicated to the AMP stack (in fact, it has at least one other application broadcasting to the internet that must have been using IIS, as well as an FTP server used for office scanners), so I suppose there might be some conflicts there.
I know very little about windows networking. A quick search suggested this might be because of NAT, but didn't offer a work-around.
Their network guy has no suggestions, and said that everything should be fine.
Is it possible to have users inside the network access the Apache server using the external IP, and if so, what needs to happen to enable that?
TYIA
Your client's NAT router is configured to forward packets arriving on its external interface for its external IP with port 80 to the internal machine, port 80, after re-writing the source and destination IP addresses in the packets.
From within the network, attempts to connect to the external IP address will be routed to the default route on the machines, the router's internal interface. This interface is not configured to forward packets back into the network.
Configure the application to listen on all IP addresses. Make sure that the server knows that the clients know it under several hostnames -- the internal IP address and the external IP address.
You might be able to re-write the NAT firewall rules on the router to perform the port forwarding for the internal interface as well, but off-the-shell equipment common in homes and small businesses do not make this task easy. More expensive gear (or home-built *BSD/Linux router machines) can do this without much effort, but it would needlessly add traffic to the router.
This isn't Apache related, nor is it CI related. It's often impossible to reach the external IP address from within the network.
Frankly, I don't know exactly why that is. I do know that it's related to how NAT (Network Address Translation) works or at least how it's implemented.
For a detailed overview of why this is, you should ask this question on serverfault. If you're simply a programmer who has to deal with it, accept that NAT usually works only from inside to outside and outside to inside, but not inside to inside.
You already mentioned one of the solutions in your question - don't use base_url. You could also simply run the server on an external IP address (not your company IP, but let's say a datacenter or something).
First URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It will be very difficult to remember an IP address. Instead of remembering the IP addresses URL came like www.intrepidkarthi.com. Url normally contains three parts. For example http://intrepidkarthi.com/index.php. Here "http" refers to the protocol it uses. Then the server name and then the requested file name.
Here I have enlisted the flow of working mechanism behind your browser
The flow of work
Your browser communicates with a name server to translate the server name "www.intrepidkarthi.com" into an IP Address, which it uses to connect to the server machine. * So your browser will see if it already has the appropriate IP address cached away from previous visits to the site. If not, it will make a DNS query to your DNS server (might be your router or your ISP's DNS server). DNS stands for Domain Name Server - For exapmle if you want to get karthik's phone number then you will look into your telephone directory. Likewise your computer doesn't know intrepidkarthi.com's IP address . So it looks into DNS.
The browser then formed a connection to the server at that IP address on port 80. HTTP protocol uses port number 80
The browser sends a GET request to the server, asking for the file "http://www.google.com/karthikeyan.htm". The webserver then returns the requested page and your browser renders it to the screen.
The firewall will control connections to & from your computer. For the most part it will just be controlling who can connect to your computer and on what ports. For web browsing your firewall generally won't be doing a whole lot.
Your router essentially guides your request through the network, helping the packets get from computer to computer and potentially doing some NAT (Network Address Tranlator) to translate IP addresses along the way (so your internat LAN request can be transitioned onto the wider internet and back).
I don't know what I understood is correct or not. I need to understand it completely till the hardware level at the back.
browser has no DNS cache. your operating system's tcp stack has.
the server name in DNS may have many IP addresses. the browsers usually choose one at random.
DNS is a tree. to get www.google.com, you go to google.com name service and get IP of the computer www.
returned HTML page is a small part of the information. In turn, it points your browser to establish many connections to other servers, to bring scripts, pictures, etc.
otherwise okay.
I created a vb .net app and basically it connects to the server (my brother's computer at his house) and sends messages. The problem I'm having is, we both have routers. The only way I'v gotten all of this to work, is by both of us connecting ppeo broadband and then our ips work, otherwise the "real ip" is used for all the pcs in my house. How can I connect tcp to him wothout him having to connect broadband. Because to connect broadband he needs to be connected to an ethernet port, so then he cannot be wireless.
Thanks
I don't know what you mean by "connect broadband", but if the computers are not on the same local network, and you have a NAT router in between, you will either have to connect them via a VPN (like Hamachi for example) or configure port forwarding on both sides on the routers.
See: How do you get Java sockets working with public IPs?
Some routers also have "Dynamic Port Forwarding", where if you are using, say port 8084 for your traffic, both your and your brother set your routers to dynamic port forward port 8084.
The router then listens for client computers connecting across port 8084, and when it sees that traffic, it will route traffic across that port to the client computer that first requested it.
Another popular "NAT-traversal" technology is UPnP. See this SO question and associated article for more information on how to use .NET to control UPnP. Again, router hardware must support it and be configured to use UPnP.
Edit: Untested, but you could try also to use and IPv6 tunneling software such as the one from go6 to create a public IP. This is like VPN, but one-sided, and less private.
Rather than router configuration, you could use a VPN. Hamachi is free and easy.