Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part V: The Part of Tens
Your private IP address is your IP address on your LAN so that your router
knows where to send traffic in and among LAN devices. If you have a LAN
printer, that device has its own IP address, as does any network device on
your LAN.
The address these devices have, however, is rarely the public IP address (the
address is the “Internet phone number” of your network), mostly because
public IP addresses are becoming scarce. Your Internet gateway has a public
IP address for your home. If you want to access from a public location a
specific device on your home network, you typically have to enable port forwarding
in your router and then add that port number on the end of your
public IP address when you try to make a connection. For example, if you had
a Web server on your network, you would type the address 68.129.5.29:80
into your browser when you tried to access it remotely — 80 is the port used
for HTTP servers.
You can usually find out your wide area network (public IP address) and LAN
(private IP address) from within your router configuration software or Web
page, such as http://192.168.1.100. You may see a status screen; this common
place shows your present IP addresses and other key information about your
present Internet connection.
If you have Windows XP, you can find your computer’s private IP address by
choosing Start➪Run. When the Run dialog box pops up, type cmd and then
click OK. In the window that opens, type ipconfig at the command prompt
and then press Enter. You see your IP address and a few other network
parameters.
If you have Windows Vista, you can find your private IP by clicking the
Windows icon (where the Start button used to be in Windows XP), choosing
Control Panel, and then choosing Network and Sharing Center. In the Network
and Sharing Center, you can access your network status, which will give you
your IP address. Keep in mind that Vista security is different from Windows
XP. You need to have Administrator access to be able to get to the Network
and Sharing Center.
This IP address is your internal, or private, IP address, not the public address
that people on the Internet use to connect to your network. If you try to give
this address to someone (perhaps so that they can connect to your computer
to do videoconferencing or to connect to a game server you’re hosting), it
doesn’t work. You need the public IP address that you find in the configuration
program for your access point or router. A number of Web sites are
available to help you determine your external, or public, IP address (for
example, whatismyip.com).