How to Find an IP Address

Video Transcript

"So, to find an IP address you would basically go to the start menu, and this is going to be relatively the same in XP and Vista. In XP there's a run command, r-u-n, and in that run command you would type cmd, charlie, mango, delta. That will basically tell you, or pull up a black box which looks very scary, but it is not going to be anything that you need to worry about because you're just going to type one command that will just show information, not change it. So, I'm going to go ahead and type that in. On Vista you go to start, and then at the bottom you have a search bar. You type in cmd just like you would in XP, and hit enter. That will bring up this black box here, and it's commonly known as a dos command prompt, d-o-s, disk operating system. It's very old stuff, but this is pretty much the easiest way to kind of figure things out. You type in one command called IP config, c-o-n-f-i-g, so ipconfig, space, slash, all, a-l-l. That gives you all the information about the type of connection you have to your network, and your network inev undoubtedly leads to the Internet, especially if you're watching this video right now. This network, or this command will show you how it gets to a particular, all your information gets routed, where it resolves the names of the websites you go to with a system called DNS, domain name system. So, when you type in google.com google.com is not really known to the computer world; its IP address is, 207.blah-blah-blah.blah-blah-blah.blah-blah-blah. In this case, on my computer my IP address is 192.168.11.244. Why am I not scared that you know that? Well, it can change. I can change it myself, I and if if you have a IP address from your, from your cable provider or DSL provider that will change probably in three days. So, it's it's constantly changing because to get a static IP address costs a lot of money, because there are only so many numbers available at one time. IP addresses are separated in four octets; 192 to a 168.11.24, or 244 is mine. So, Internet, excuse me, Internet IP addresses are the same, but generally they're public IP addresses. Private IP addresses generally start with 192168, or 172.16, or 10.whatever.whatever.whatever. Those are private IP addresses, so if you're assigned one of those you're on a private network. If you're assigned a public IP address anything that's outside of that range then you're on a public network, so if you have a 70.86.whatever.whatever you're probably on Comcast's public network. You're plugged directly into the Internet; in which case I'd strongly advise you to get a firewall too. But, that's pretty much how you would determine what an IP address is."