What Is My Ip Address?

Can I know what IP address my home network has?

• Possible Duplicate: http://superuser.com/questions/382265/fastest-method-to-determine-my-pcs-ip-address-windows I'm not sure the title of my question is appropriate, and I'm not sure my question is going to be appropriately worded. I've just started reading about IP addresses, and I'm very confused about many things so I will probably make some mistakes. I just hope it's going to be comprehensible. I've learned that at least some of the IP addresses I can see when I type ipconfig into my command line are local, that is they are useless to people and things trying to contact my devices. They are only useful for my devices to communicate with one another. Then there apparently is something called NAT that creates a single IP address that the outside world can use to communicate with my home network. Is it possible for me to find out what this number is? I've learned that there are two kinds of IP addresses: private and multicast. I understand that the IP address of my computer I can learn by using ipconfig is a private address. Is the address produced by NAT a multicast address? One of the numbers ipconfig outputs is "default gateway". If I understand correctly, it is the IP number of my router. Is it the number produced by the NAT thing, or is it also a local number? If it's the first, then I think the answer to my previous question must be "no" because this number is not in the multicast address range of IP addresses.

• Answer:

  I think you are very confused. You can find out your public IP using the answers to http://superuser.com/questions/382265/fastest-method-to-determine-my-pcs-ip-address-windows question "I've learned that there are two kinds of IP addresses: private and multicast." Not sure where you heard this, but its wrong. Multicast has to do with sending a message to more than one server. Private IP addresses are the reserved block which are always local Default gateway is a local address, not a public one The "NAT thing" is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation and in the sense that you care about, it figures out how when someone wants to send information to you and you buddy, both of whom are on the same network, which one of you the third party wants to reach.