It’s how they determine which customer is requesting which website and connect them accordingly. Your public IP address is assigned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to your home network. If you already know the difference between public and private IPs, skip directly to our sections on how to find your public IP and how to find your local IP.

Just like the postal service uses your home address to deliver packages, website servers use your IP address (often referred to simply as an “IP”) to send the data you request (like a website you want to visit) to your device.īefore we get into how to find your IP address, it’s important to determine if you’re looking for a public (also called external) or a local (also called internal or private) IP address.

IP addresses are also used to identify people. So when you type in googlecom, a Domain Name Service (DNS) translates the request into the string of numbers (IP address) that correspond to where Google resides on the internet: 8.8.8.8. On the other hand, the public or external IP address will come to the router and it is not typical of the equipment as if it is the private one, so in order to find out, we can do them in different ways more or less orthodox.While people refer to a site like Google by name, computers use a string of numbers to represent that domain. Normally these addresses are automatically assigned from the router to our equipment, otherwise we choose the opposite, either because we prefer to give static addresses in our network to the equipment or because let's pay for a static ip service to our supplier.Īs a general rule, to check our private IP we usually go to the menu of System Preferences> Network, see the active connection at the moment and look at it there, although we can also do it through the terminal with the following commands:

One is a private ip address in our LAN that we will have so that the different computers of our network can be seen and from which it will not be possible to access in a normal way from 'outside' of it, and another is the public address that our ISP will normally assign us and that will be valid to be able to identify ourselves outside. Within network addressing we have two different addresses assigned to our equipment.

Get ip address mac terminal command