Question

Which is my real IP? The one shown in ipconfig /all or the one shown in (whatismyip.org) (I’ll just call it WISMIP for short)?

If I’m not wrong, the one in WISMIP is the IP from my ISP’s proxy?

Does this mean that if a site blocks this IP, its blocking everyone who routes through this proxy?

Finally, when I look at ipconfig /all, I should be looking under IPv4 address?

My IP has been blocked by my hosting service, which IP should I provide so they could remove me from the block list?

Answer 1

whatismyip.org will show you the address that your ISP has provided to you: this is the IP address that everyone else in the world can see, and the one that is blocked. Unless you are connecting directly to your ISP – no router, no wireless – this would not be what shows up in ipconfig. This is very unusual, that a (non-server) computer is directly connected to the internet as a whole.

If there is any box at all in between your computer and your ISP, your computer will probably have a different IP. The reason is that there is a finite number of IPs in the world, so there has to be some way of conserving them. That way is NAT, or Network Address Translation.

Essentially your router hands out IPs to every machine in your space – office, house, whatever – and handles all traffic behind itself. It passes all that traffic along the one link with the one global IP address provided by your ISP. So every computer’s traffic appears to come from that one IP address. For incoming traffic, it catches the return packets, and routes them to the correct internal address. In this way, you can reuse more or less the whole address space of IP in your intranet without colliding with a valuable global address.

If you look at your router’s configuration page, you should be able to find a page with the allocation for each computer – it’ll probably be labled DHCP. Alternatively, you can go to whatismyip.org from two different computers that connect to the same router, and you should see the same ip for both.