How can I tell if my ip address is static or not (Mac OS X)?

Question

Well everything is in the title really... :-)

I want to exclude my IP from my GA account but there is no point in doing that unless what I get from http://whatismyipaddress.com/ for example, is a permanent, static IP right ?

Looking at my Network preferences, while connected on my router's WiFi network, there is no "WiFi is connected to...and has the IP address...".

Does that mean my IP address is already set to static ?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Solution

The IP that you care about, and which is shown by whatismyip.com, is the IP assigned by your ISP to your router, not the IP assigned by your router to your Mac.

First, you can check the configuration of your router's WAN/Internet interface. If it says it has a static IP, then you presumably have a static IP.

However, the converse is not necessarily true. The router may by configured to use DHCP to get its IP configuration, but your ISP could still have assigned a permanent, static IP to your connection in their DHCP server.

If you have residential ISP service, this is very unlikely. It's usually only offered for business accounts. If they do offer it for residential service, you would generally have to request it specially, and probably pay an extra fee for it. So if you haven't explicitly requested a static IP, you probably don't have one.

Comments

[sean christe]

What you get form the site is your external IP address. What you see looking at network preferences on your computer will be the IP assigned by your router. They are not the same thing and whther or not they are static is not the same thing. You can yourself setup your router and computer to use a static IP but that will have no bearing on whether the external IP is static. The external IP is controlled by your service provider and is generally not static unless you pay extra to your service provider.

[Kinnectus]

Your public address is completely separate to an IP leased by your router (LAN/wifi). If you do an ifconfig you'll get the LAN IP which (in most cases) will be DHCP (not static). To double check, open the Mac network settings for your wifi and it'll state whether it's static or DHCP. Your Internet IP, on the other hand, in most cases, be assigned from a pool on a leased basis. You would normally have to ask or pay for a static IP from your ISP.

[slhck]

@EBGreen May want to post an answer there

[sean christe]

Meh...to provide a good answer I felt that I should provide mac specific instructions related to determining whether DHCP was enabled or not and how to set up a static IP. I'm not a mac person so I don't know those instructions off the top of my head. Hence I went with a comment rather than an answer.

[Tetsujin]

Luck of the draw, I guess, but mine has actually only changed once in 10 years, Virgin cable, UK. They don't claim it's fixed, but they appear to assign the same DHCP address each time; even after once having my connection off for a week.

[Barmar]

DHCP servers generally try to reassign the same IP. I've also had the same IP for many years. I got a new router a few months ago, I cloned the MAC address of the old router to it, and it received the same IP as well (even though I use dyn.com, I've gotten used to this IP and I frequently grep for it in my company's server logs).