Smart way to get the public Internet IP address/geo loc

Question

I have a computer on the local network, behind a NAT router. I have some 192.168.0.x addresses, but I really want to know my public IP address, not somethin

Answer 1

I believe you really need to connect with some server to get your external IP.

Answer 2

If you are worried about connection lose or the availability of the site, you can also try this way to avoid that issue by including above suggestions.

    using System.Threading;

    Task<string>[] tasks = new[]
    {
      Task<string>.Factory.StartNew( () => new System.Net.WebClient().DownloadString(@"http://icanhazip.com").Trim() ),
      Task<string>.Factory.StartNew( () => new System.Net.WebClient().DownloadString(@"http://checkip.dyndns.org").Trim() )
    };

    int index = Task.WaitAny( tasks );
    string ip = tasks[index].Result;

Hope this one also help.

Answer 3

you may be able to use uPNP and fall-back to whatsmyip.com if that fails.

Answer 4

I prefer http://icanhazip.com. It returns a simple text string. No HTML parsing required.

string myIp = new WebClient().DownloadString(@"http://icanhazip.com").Trim();

Answer 5

After some search, and by expanding my requirements, I found out that this will get me not only the IP, but GEO-location as well:

class GeoIp
{
    static public GeoIpData GetMy()
    {
        string url = "http://freegeoip.net/xml/";
        WebClient wc = new WebClient();
        wc.Proxy = null;
        MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(wc.DownloadData(url));
        XmlTextReader rdr = new XmlTextReader(url);
        XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
        ms.Position = 0;
        doc.Load(ms);
        ms.Dispose();
        GeoIpData retval = new GeoIpData();
        foreach (XmlElement el in doc.ChildNodes[1].ChildNodes)
        {
            retval.KeyValue.Add(el.Name, el.InnerText);
        }
        return retval;
    }
}

XML returned, and thus key/value dictionary will be filled as such:

<Response>
    <Ip>93.139.127.187</Ip>
    <CountryCode>HR</CountryCode>
    <CountryName>Croatia</CountryName>
    <RegionCode>16</RegionCode>
    <RegionName>Varazdinska</RegionName>
    <City>Varazdinske Toplice</City>
    <ZipCode/>
    <Latitude>46.2092</Latitude>
    <Longitude>16.4192</Longitude>
    <MetroCode/>
</Response>

And for convenience, return class:

class GeoIpData
{
    public GeoIpData()
    {
        KeyValue = new Dictionary<string, string>();
    }
    public Dictionary<string, string> KeyValue;
}

Answer 6

Depending on the router you use, chances are pretty good that you could get it directly from the router. Most of them have a web interface, so it would be a matter of navigating to the correct web page (e.g., "192.168.0.1/whatever") and "scraping" the external IP address from that page. The problem with this is, of course, that it's pretty fragile -- if you change (or even re-configure) your router, chances are pretty good that it'll break.