Keeping Track of your Public IP Address from a Router

Keeping Track of your External / Public IP Address

Find your External / Public IP Address

You – or anyone else – connecting to your Mac from the internet will connect to your public or external IP address, the one assigned by your ISP to your Router on its WAN port. For many services, you'll need to tell the person using the service what that IP address is. (Some services, like file sharing applications Gnutella and BitTorrent, learn your IP Address when you contact a peer server.)

You can find your public (aka external) IP Address in a number of ways. Maybe the easiest is just to connect to a website such as WhatIsMyIP.com and see what IP address you're using.

Keeping Track of a Changing IP Address

If you have a problem with your ISP changing your IP address too often, you might want to sign up with DynDNS.org or a Similar Service such as NoIP.com. They can give you a symbolic name (e.g. yourname.dyndns.org) that it will convert into the current IP address of your system.

You can also download Mac tools, such as DNSUpdate, that run on your Mac, check your current IP, and keep DynDNS.org up to date automagically (configure it to use your external IP address when checking).

I have even seen some newer routers, such as the NetGear 814, that include the ability to keep DynDNS.org aware of your IP address automatically - if your router supports this, take advantage of it! Then you or others can just use that name to connect to your server and always get connected at your Mac's current IP address. There are other similar services you can Google for.

To use the address you have created, you simply enter the host name you have registered instead of the IP address.

BACK to Port Forwarding Pages Top NEXT (Connecting to Home Server)