How to find IP of WiFi Powerline adapter

While connected to the wifi of a powerline adapter, the ip my mac network settings and ifconfig show is 192.168.0.10, however when browsing to this ip I get an ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

The actual ip is 192.168.0.90

I'm just curious to understand why there is a difference

Context

Installed some powerline wifi adapters the other day ( something like this )

Needed to change the network settings to match my existing wifi name and password. Thought I could use the small bit of networking knowledge to hit the adapter's ip directly for the settings instead of installing vendor software to do so. ipconfig didn't point to the right place so in the end had to get the software and that located the adapters and listed the correct ip to change the settings.

How was the vendor software able to find the true ip?

kiramdany

Posted 2017-10-10T14:52:01.957

Reputation: 33

Are you asking about the ip address of the adapter itself or the ip address of the client (your mac)? If you are doing ipconfig on the client device you would be told the local intranet ip address of the client not the powerline adapter. You would have to look to your DHCP server for that information. "How was the vendor software able to find the true ip?" - Closed software numerous solutions impossible to determine based on the information provided. I have doubts the powerline device would even receive an ip address (based on my own powerline device not having one) – Ramhound – 2017-10-10T14:56:23.357

Yes, I was being silly. What I was really thinking of was to find out my default gateway. But then the default gateway would be the router/modem, so got that wrong as well. However, running netstat -nr I can see the ip of the powerline adapter listed, so I guess I just need to educate myself more about routing tables and networking in general – kiramdany – 2017-10-17T09:48:41.577

Answers

Presuming these devices work as simply a 'dumb hub' - in which case there won't be an ip address displayed in the ipconfig output at all. What you likely thought you needed was the gateway address, but this will be the ip of a completely different system.

How the software was able to find the true IP is something that you can only really guess at, until you do some more research such as using wireshark to see what packets it actually sends out in the discovery phrase. It's most likely that the device is listening on a port and just responds with the IP address it's using. All the software has to do is a scan of all IP's in your subnet, using this port to see which devices respond in the manner it expects.

Other such ways of identifying the devices is using multicast or broadcasts configured in such a way that only the power-line adaptors reply.

djsmiley2k TMW

Posted 2017-10-10T14:52:01.957

Reputation: 5 937

Mine didn't show up in the DHCP clients list on the router. You can find it on your subnet using nmap:

nmap -p80 192.168.0.0/24

The vendor software could do the same thing and check the http response if it finds one.

If you find the IP you can check all ports:

nmap -p- 192.168.0.108

Mine has telnet open, so the scanning software can use that too if it has a secret knock.

Zsolt Takács

Posted 2017-10-10T14:52:01.957

Reputation: 1