Pinging your computers symbolic name

Question

I have been playing about with pinging website and getting their IP addresses while seeing how quickly a packet be sent and back, now i tried to ping my own PC and instead of getting the ip address format of 193.22.33.201 etc im now getting fe80::18od etc etc why would this be happening?

Answer 1

That's your link-local IPv6 address.

Answer 2

You can use the -4 command line parameter to force the ping command to use IPv4.

Answer 3

It is happening because your system has used an IPv6 resolution of the name instead of an IPv4 resolution; in general, names map to more than one address and it is up to negotiation (typically done automatically for you by system functions like getaddrinfo) to sort out which to actually use. For purely local communications (whether with localhost or your public hostname) it doesn't really matter which communication protocol is used, since the data never leaves the machine anyway.