Network question for Flack

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Ice Cream Jonsey
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Network question for Flack

Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

This site - https://www.whatismyip.com/ - tells you your machine's local IP address. Is there a way to get a router to stop broadcasting that? I can't think of any reason why the Internet needs to know that, since the router handles putting stuff where it needs to go.
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Jizaboz
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Re: Network question for Flack

Post by Jizaboz »

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Mon Jan 21, 2019 10:18 am This site - https://www.whatismyip.com/ - tells you your machine's local IP address. Is there a way to get a router to stop broadcasting that? I can't think of any reason why the Internet needs to know that, since the router handles putting stuff where it needs to go.
I'm not Flack and he'll probably correct me but..

That's not your actual "local" IP address. That is known as your WAN address (Wide Area Network) and it belongs to the router or "modem" that provides your gateway to the Internet.. The WAN address is exposed to the internet. If you do not wish to display your real WAN address to anything, you use a VPN connection that assumes a VPN server address as your WAN address instead of your router's address.

If you only want to mask your WAN address while browsing the internet websites, you can set up a proxy connection in your preferred web browser.
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Flack
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Re: Network question for Flack

Post by Flack »

Jiz nailed it. When you visit a website, your machine has to tell the site your IP address so it knows where to return the web request. Your cable modem isn't broadcasting anything out like a beacon or anything, per se. In PHP, you can display a visitor's IP address pretty easily:

Code: Select all

<? 
echo $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]; 
?>
So in regular terms, visiting a website is like walking up to someone, handing them a note, and then having them return a different note back to you. And a VPN is like handing your note to a third party, having the third party deliver the note for you, accepting the other person's note on your behalf, and then returning the note to you. And a really good VPN is the same thing except they hire people from other countries or guys with selective amnesia to do all the note passing. And then there's onion routing, which is writing each word of the note on a different slip of paper and asking a dozen people to each deliver one word to the person, and doing the same in reverse. Oh, and then there's SSL, which is sealing the envelope so that the guy passing the notes back and forth can't read what's inside them. :)

And also, Jiz was right about internal vs. external IP addresses. My cable modem's IP address is 68.12.152.10 (or something). But that plugs into my router and internally, all my addresses are in the 192.168.1.x range. So the router keeps track of who requested what. Publicly, they're all going to look like they came from that 68.12.152.10 address.
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