How to Find User's IP address

Question

I need help to find user's IP address who are browsing to my site (using C# Code).

I am confused about system IP address, ISP IP address, Network address and what is IPV4 and IPV6.

Below is the code I got from other source:

protected string GetUserIP()
{
        string userIP = string.Empty;
        HttpContext context = System.Web.HttpContext.Current;

        string ipAddress = context.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"];

        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ipAddress))
        {
            string[] addresses = ipAddress.Split(',');
            if (addresses.Length != 0)
            {
                userIP = addresses[0];
            }
        }
        else if (HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress.Length != 0)
        {
            userIP = HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress;
        }

        return userIP;
}

But here I am not getting the expected result.

When test this in my local-host I got 127.0.0.1

When I deploy this into my development server and browse the page in my local machine, I got different address.

I tried accessing the same URL in other machine and IP address are same.

The systems I am using to access my development server deployed page in in same network.

So is it the network IP my code returned..?

Because when I find my IP using ipconfig command it's again a different!

And when I checked my IP using 3rd party site (http://www.whatismyip.com/ip-address-lookup/), it shows the actual IP I expected. How can I get that actual IP using C# code?

My ultimate goal is, get the user location details who is browsing my site using Maxmind City DB, but for that I need to pass the IP of browsing user.

string ip = GetUserIP();
string db = “GeoIP2-City.mmdb";
var reader = new DatabaseReader(db);
var city = reader.City(ip);
double? lat = city.Location.Latitude;
double? lang = city.Location.Longitude;

For the IP I got from my above code, I got exception (IP not found in Database) when I tried to get information from Maxmind DB, but for the IP I got from "whatismyip" website, I got the details from the Maxmind DB.

Hope My question is clear. Please let me know if anyone have any inputs.

Thanks, Sharath

You need your external address, which you cannot obtain when accessing the server from an internal network. — CodeCaster, Jul 03 '14 at 08:55
have a look on this [link](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/735350/how-to-get-a-users-client-ip-address-in-asp-net). — user3442830, Jul 03 '14 at 12:15

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 03 '14 at 10:15

I guess this will help

public String GetLanIPAddress()
    {
        //The X-Forwarded-For (XFF) HTTP header field is a de facto standard for identifying the originating IP address of a 
        //client connecting to a web server through an HTTP proxy or load balancer
        String ip = HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"];

        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ip))
        {
            ip = HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"];
        }

        return ip;
    }

How to Find User's IP address

1 Answers1