Here is your IP and your User Agent.
Now that you know the answer to “what is my ip”…
OK, now that we’ve gotten your answer to what is my ip, let’s actually talk about what an IP or an IPAddress actually is. When your computer boots up and it’s plugged into a network somewhere, it needs to get an address so that other computers can identify it for sending and receiving of data. It’s like the address on your house. This address is used for routing data like letters are routed between houses. A house is on a street which is in a city which is in a country. An IP Address similarly has a network part and a host part.
IPV4 (the original addressing scheme)
Back in the day the creators of the Internet designed a scheme that would handle quite a few addresses, 2^32, which is 4,294,967,296 to be exact (although this seems like a large number, we are in fact running out). The original IPV4 addressing scheme was made up of 4 numbers separated by a “.”. Each of those numbers is sometimes called an octet. Check out our write up on what is an octet here. Each octet is an integer between 0 and 255.
Network Address Composition
An IP Address has 2 parts. Network and Host. Depending on the class of the network, different portions of the left side is network versus the right which is the host. There are 3 classes. A, B and C. When a 0 is the last number of an ip address, that usually means the network itself and when it is 255, that usually is the broadcast address, although this can all change through subnetting.
Class A IP Addresses
Class A is the network that has the most host addresses. In this class, the 8 bits are network, the remaining 24 are host. These include 0.0.0.0 to 127.255.255.
Class B IP Addresses
Class B is next largest address space in terms of hosts. The first 16 bits are network and the remaining 16 bits are for host. The first byte is 128-191. The range is 128.0.0.0 to 192.255.255.255.
Class C IP Addresses
Finally Class C is the smallest in terms of hosts per network. Here the fist 24 bits are network and the remaining 8 bits are host. There will be up to 254 hosts per class C network.
Who manages all this?
The IPAddress space is managed by IANA. IANA has specified certain networks as private networks.
Private Networks
IANA has specified certain networks to be private. These are useful for testing and for making your own internal networks. The Following networks are private. Class A: 10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255, Class B: 172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255 and Class C: 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255. Any traffic that comes from the outside world trying to get into your network with one of these network addresses is considered bogus or bogons and should be dropped.
Masquerading
Because we are running out of networks on the IPV4 scheme, we often use masquerading to hide many machines on private IP Address ranges behind a router that knows how to get the traffic in and out going to the right internal hosts. That is how a private internal network can reach the outside world. This is also why your IP Address that we displayed above is likely not the ip address on your actual machine and why you won’t see it if you run ifconfig or ipconfig.
Special IP Addresses
Some good IPs to remember are the following.
1.1.1.1 – DNS server for CloudFlare
8.8.8.8 – DNS server for Google
8.8.4.4 – Another DNS Server for Google.
User Agent
In addition to your IP Address, I also included your browser’s user agent. The user agent is basically the description that your browser supplies when it hits a web server. This description usually includes the name of the browser and the operating system that you are running.