How to extract your outside IP address-without a chicken or a monkey
How to extract your outside IP address-without a chicken or a monkey
Frequently I find myself asking students in my Network+ or Cisco CCNA classes to divulge their favorite resource to use when they want to determine their external (publicly accessible) IP address.
Here are some of the more popular answers: whatismyip.com
Or ipchicken.com.
Or perhaps even better, the ipmonkey.com:
I did not include the actual IP address that I obtained when I was writing this blog, not because it is some big secret, but because I suggest to readers to run the same tests themselves and compare output. “Compare to what?” you ask. Well what if I want to know my external IP address, but I want the results from a command prompt? There is a way, so let’s see it in action.
This method uses the command prompt, but there is a way to do this in PowerShell as well. I am not the originator of these methods, but I find them useful enough that I want to throw my voice into the mix and announce them to others who may find them useful also.
The command uses nslookup in non-interactive mode and looks like this:
nslookup myip.opendns.com resolver1.opendns.com
See figure 4 to see the results:
Hey! That is the same address I found using the aforementioned web resources, but I did not have to launch a browser to get it! Now you can use that information as input in other scripted activities!
I did mention that it can also be done in PowerShell, so I will include that here, although I am not a guru on that topic (always willing to learn more…).
The command and output is
(Invoke-WebRequest -URI (“ifconfig.me/ip”)).Content
and is shown in figure 5:
Be aware that it could take up to a minute before the above command generates output, but it does work. Hope you find this to be a useful tidbit!
Until next time….
Mark Jacob
Cisco and CompTIA Network + Instructor – Interface Technical Training
Phoenix, AZ
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