Every once in a while, you actually care what private IP address your Android phone picked up on your wireless network. Why? Well, you may be capturing packets at the network edge, troubleshooting some obscure problem, or testing network connectivity. If you use an iphone, you most likely don’t need to know this because you don’t have network or connectivity problems…and even if you did, you’d most likely get an Android user to fix it….uh…ouch. I went there… (inject hint of sarcasm here).
Your private IP address differs from your public IP address. Your public IP address can easily be found using www.ipweasel.com, or the similar site www.ipchicken.com. Your public IP address is the address you look like to a website you are visiting on the internet.
Your Private IP address is used locally, it is one of three networks which were defined by RFC-1918, 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x/20, and 192.168.x.x. These addresses can not be routed on the internet, and so mere mortals get to use them for private networks. If you want to browse the internet, your Private IP address has to be NAT’ed to a Public IP address….but I digress. If you really want to read more Network Address Translation… google it
So anyways…I recently needed to find my ip address, and instead of searching through the menus, I decided to do it the hard way and downloaded an App from the Play Store. It’s called OS Monitor , and not only does it show you your IP address, it also shows you every TCP connection and state, every process that is running, cpu usage, battery usage, voltage, temperature, and everything else you could possibly want.
You can also do the easy thing and go to ‘settings’….click ‘WiFi’ then hit the menu button and choose ‘advanced’, but this is way more fun, and we’re all about having fun here.
While I was there, I also tried a couple other network tools, and found some really great Android network scanners. (Wow, I can still remember when you needed an install of NMAP to get network scans like that, now it’s a 10 second free download!).
So in the end, I was able to solve my network problem using my android and a network sniffer, and found some really cool tools in the process! Hope this helps you out and puts your Android to work too.
