Finding Public Ip Address of security camera

Question

I have installed my home security camera and it's run on 192.168.192.2 localhost and is accessible through android apps. But I would like to know what the public IP address of this camera is so I can access even when am not home.

Answer 1

But I would like to know what the public IP address of this camera is so I can access even when am not home.

Disclaimer: I do not recommend that you do what I am about to say that you could do. In fact, I strongly recommend that you do not enable port forwarding.

But, anyways, if you do enable port forwarding on your router/modem then you may be able to access the camera from the same IP address that everything else on the Internet sees your router/modem traffic coming from.

You can find out what public IP your ISP has assigned to you by Googling "What's my IP" and Google will tell you.

Of course, you also have to know what port the camera is using an probably a bunch of other specific details about the camera (which is one reason why this question will likely be closed soon).

And the down side is that by enabling port forwarding you open yourself up to a huge amount of attacks on your (formerly) private home network from the public Internet.

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If you want a safer way to access a home video camera from anywhere, you will have to buy some product/service like Nest or whatever.

Answer 2

It has no public IP and that's by design.

Making the camera accessible remotely requires a proxy or reverse-proxy to interface between the private IP space and public IP space.

Typically a proxy server would be set up to be accessible via your public IP. This proxy would require security and authentication. A web server or a VPN server are common mechanisms. However this approach requires a static IP (or dynamic workarounds) and does not lend itself well to non-business connections.

A reverse-proxy approach would involve setting up a cloud server on something like Amazon to act as a relay for the house reverse proxy to stream into. This works well with dynamic non-business connections.

Doing any of these things securely is difficult on your own and there is an entire service industry to provide these functions because it's difficult.

There are some cameras that have a builtin servers to provide the proxy, but if you were using one of those I assume you wouldn't be asking here.

Answer 3

In an usual home network setup, no device that is within the home network can be accessed from outside. You can connect from your home network to the outside world, but not the other way, because that's how NAT (Network Address Translation) works, which is implemented in almost any home router.

NAT allows multiple devices within a home network, each with its own private IP address, access the Internet using one common public IP address, which is in fact assigned to your router.

So if you try to access your public IP address from outside, you can in fact only access your router (and most home routers have default configuration to reject any requests from outside anyway). You cannot access any device within your home network because the router has no way to know to which device it should forward the request.

You can - as @hft's answer says - configure port forwarding on your router. In that case, incoming connection on a particular port to your public IP address will be forwarded to particular port (the same or different) on a device with particular private IP address within your home network.

For example, assume that your public IP address is 1.2.3.4 and the camera has a built-in server that serves the images on port 9000 (you have to know the port number). If the port 9000 is also a default port for the application you use to connect to the camera, you can forward incoming port 9000 on your router to port 9000 on 192.168.192.2, and after you do this, if there are no other issues (and there may be), you should now be able to view your camera if you connect from outside just to 1.2.3.4.

Or, you can for example forward a different port - say 4000 - on your router to port 9000 on 192.168.192.2 (for example in case your ISP blocks incoming connections on port 9000, which is entirely possible). In that case your camera-viewing application must allow to connect to a different port than the default one (9000). If you connect to 1.2.3.4 port 4000, you should be able to view your camera now.

As you can see from that description, it is not very simple, as home routers are usually not designed to be used that way, ie. for accessing devices within home network from outside. They are designed to access devices that are outside from the home network.