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recently I turned my Router to a wireless access point for my home network. Unfortunately, I forgot to note down the AP's IP Address and Subnet.

How do I reliably get the IP of my AP?

Thank's in advance.

EDIT: OS is Vista XP, but I have xubuntu dual booted.

Ok so the configuration is as follow: PCs => (wireless) Belkin Router (AP) -> (wired, bridged) 2Wire Gateway Modem

I want to be able to get the IP Address of the AP, ie. the Belkin Router

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  • Possible duplicate: superuser.com/questions/142851/get-ip-address-of-router
    – Hello71
    Jun 5, 2010 at 13:36
  • In my care, it's a bridged network, in the link you've given, it's a normal PC -> Modem network. So I don't think it's duplicate.
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 5, 2010 at 13:41
  • What is the ip address of your computer? If you haven't made any drastic changes, it should default to xx.xx.xx.1 (where xx is the same as your computer's)
    – default
    Jun 5, 2010 at 14:23
  • Can't you just plug your computer into the router? Or do you have the Ethernet ports disabled?
    – Hello71
    Jun 6, 2010 at 16:10

14 Answers 14

Reset to default
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Since it is simply functioning as a WAP device now, short of reseting the WAP and using the default, it might not be all that easy.

Try going through your ARP cache (arp -a in windows, might be similar in linux) and see if the WAP has an entry. Just try each address on your local subnet that's listed.

Other than that, the WAP should be completely transparent so unless you're already communicating with its IP, its IP probably won't show up in network traffic.

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  • 8
    +1 for using arp -a
    – ta.speot.is
    Jun 6, 2010 at 0:18
  • Nope, the only one I can see is the gateway modem's IP
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 6, 2010 at 3:47
  • @andreas Then if it's not 192.168.0.1, 192.168.1.1, 192.168.2.1, or *.2 for any of those, I'd just reset it back to factory settings and then reconfigure it.
    – Darth Android
    Jun 6, 2010 at 5:08
  • 1
    arp -a saved my behind just now, 3 years after the answer :) Thank you!
    – Chahk
    Dec 30, 2013 at 17:22
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Unless you get get in in from your arp cache (try doing ping 192.168.0.255 first), the only way I know to find it is port scanning. Using something like nmap to scan your network - a WAP should be listening on port 80, and possibly something like telnet as well. Try nmap 192.168.0.1/24

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IPCONFIG /ALL (in a command line in Windows) will tell you under the heading Default Gateway. ifconfig under Linux will tell you, and also on Mac OS X (command line), and in the GUI: Network preferences, select wireless, advanced (right below) and TCP/IP tab, router entry.

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  • 1
    It tells me the IP address of the modem, but not the Access Point. Perhaps a bit of background will be useful, my configuration is: PCs => Belkin Router (AP) -> (wired) Gateway Modem if I do ipconfig /all, it will tell me the Gateway Modem's IP, but not the AP.
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 5, 2010 at 13:01
  • The router will give the IP addresses, right, so look for the DHCP server IP. It's also listed if memory serves me.
    – Henno
    Jun 5, 2010 at 13:16
  • The DNS address is coincidentally the same as gateway address. So no, I don't think it works.
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 5, 2010 at 13:18
  • I corrected it to DHCP
    – Henno
    Jun 5, 2010 at 13:20
  • and conveniently, it's also the same as DNS and gateway.
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 5, 2010 at 13:23
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Default IP is 192.168.2.1 for a Belkin router, but can't you do a tracert to, say google.com and then find out which one is your router? (It should usually be the first hop.)

Or you could look in your browser's history...

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  • The first hop is the Gateway, not the AP unfortunately :(
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 5, 2010 at 13:42
  • +1 for tracert. @Andreas: If your network traffic passes the AP you should still be able to find out the ipaddress of it with tracert. In the tracertstats, is there any other ip-addresses that are on the same subnet as your computer's?
    – default
    Jun 5, 2010 at 14:19
  • Nope, sadly it goes straight to the Gateway
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 5, 2010 at 14:43
  • a WAP doesn't work at the network layer so you won't see an IP hop.
    – Andy
    Jun 5, 2010 at 16:15
  • That's an interesting point, do you have a more elaborate explanation/article on that?
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 7, 2010 at 3:23
2

to accomplish this on a modern windows OS from the command line

netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid

find the network to which you are interested and connected, note the bssid and then run

arp -a

now find the bssid you discovered above in the new list of physical addresses, your access points internet address is listed on the same line.

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1

I had the same problem. From my Windows 7 PC, i could do a ping on the local subnet by typing

ping 192.168.X.255 -- where X is your local subnet. This should send a broadcast to ALL ips in the subnet. Of course, the ping command will fail.

Next type arp -a This should now list ALL the ping responses received on the subnet. Note that if there are systems on the subnet which have ECHO RESPONSE turned OFF, they wont show up in the list.

One of the these IPs listed will be your AP's IP. If not sure, lookup on the MAC and find out who the vendor is... (http://www.macvendorlookup.com/)

HTH

-A's B

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1

You do not need to reset the Belkin router, can you follow below steps:-

  1. Connect to the Belkin AP using LAN cable
  2. Change your machine IP address to 192.168.2.50, subnet 255.255.255.0, leave blank for gateway and dns
  3. From your browser, go to 192.168.2.254 then you will go to the Belkin setup page
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1
  • This will only work if the Belkin router is 192.168.2.254. The OP has said he doesn't know the IP at all.
    – Burgi
    May 8, 2016 at 15:04
0

Reset the router to defaults and reconfigure?

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1
  • I could do that, but I really want to know if there's a way to do get IP Address of an AP. Thank's for the suggestion though.
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 5, 2010 at 14:43
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you should be able to see this from the 2wire web interface. I'm assuming that it is a router which is the gateway address from ipconfig. Most likely would be in the logs. If the belkin was set to dhcp it should be in the dhcp log. the other option would be to use a ping utility to ping every address in the ip range and see which ones respond. if your ip address is 192.168.1.2 say you would ping every address from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254.

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  • I've done that, and I still can't find the AP IP Address.
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 5, 2010 at 18:51
  • can you plug in an ethernet cable into the belkin router and see if you can get an ip address from that router? if you do it will probably have a gateway address which would be the ip address of the belkin router. if all else fails reset the router. Usually if you hold in the reset button for about 30 seconds or so it resets the router to the factory default at which point you can reconfigure it.
    – user4892
    Jun 6, 2010 at 3:52
  • Nope, the DHCP, DNS and Gateway again are pointing to my Gateway Modem even on ethernet. I think I will start considering reseting the router .
    – Andreas Wong
    Jun 6, 2010 at 3:56
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In the command prompt you can do arp -a This will show you the MAC address and IP of everything connected to the same broadcast domain that you are. Given your setup, this should show you everything on your network. You can figure out the IP by finding out the MAC address of your AP. Usually this is printed right on the device itself somewhere.

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Use this command ( This gives details about all active ips starting with 192.168.1. & their mac & brand ):

sudo arp-scan 192.168.1.0/24

Above command can be read as below

This will give the list of active ips. You can replace 192.168.1.0 with whatever ip u want but the "/24" is a must.

Sorry if there are some mistakes this is my first time writing solutions.

Souce: https://sites.google.com/site/unityindiversity99/

The above website has a lot of solutions for opensource softwares and linux ubuntu

Hope this helps

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  • 1
    Welcome. That link goes on forever and covers quite a range of stuff. Could you add some kind of identifier to your answer for where in that link to look? Thanks.
    – fixer1234
    Dec 13, 2014 at 5:12
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I had the same issue and didn't know the exact nmap syntax to search for, so I've downloaded https://nmap.org/dist/nmap-6.47-setup.exe for windows, typed my network 192.168.0.1/24 in the address field, hit scan, and then checked the results that show with Discovered open port 80/tcp on ... (webservers).

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If you are using Linux, check the interface you are using with:

$ ifconfig

Then (if connected by WLAN):

$ iwconfig wlp2s0

Extract the MAC address of the access point from the response, and use nmap to check the devices in your network:

$ sudo nmap -sn 192.168.0.1/24

Find the MAC address in the list and its reference to the IP address.

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  • It is very difficult to determine an address of a transparent device, e.g. switch or WAP, because the device may have an address in a different network and would never respond to ARP on your network.
    – Ron Maupin
    Dec 10, 2016 at 5:48
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You can use nmap to scan IPs near you own IP.
or use ping:http://www.linuxscrew.com/2007/09/17/ping-range-of-ip-addresses-in-parallel-with-fping/
there are lots of tools doing this in linux.
you can even use aircrack-ng(but this one needs some time to work).
EDIT:
I think transparent routers(I think your router is) don't have IPs.

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  • 2
    There's no such thing as a "transparent" router.
    – MDMarra
    Jun 5, 2010 at 17:29

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