How to discover device IP addresses on your network

How do you find the IP address of your router, wireless printer, other computers and devices on your network. How do you spot devices that shouldn’t be on your network? Use these tools.

Computers work with IP addresses rather than the names and URLs that people use. Your computer has an IP address, your router has an IP address, a NAS (network attached storage) drive has an IP address, even wireless printers have IP addresses. How do you find out the IP addresses of devices when you need to know them?

Why you need device IP addresses

Why would you need to know the the IP addresses of computers and devices on the network? There are several reasons, for example, suppose you want to configure the router on your home or work Wi-Fi network or wired LAN, check its settings, see whether it is working properly, change the Wi-Fi channel or check error logs.

The way to access it is to enter its IP address into the address box of a web browser. It then displays the router’s home page and login form. Once logged in you can change the settings, but what is the router’s IP address?

You might want to ping a device to check that it is responding. For example, if you try to print something and nothing happens or the computer cannot see the printer, you can ping it. This means sending a standard message, a sort of “Hello, are you there?” The device responds with the equivalent of “Yes, I am.”

Pinging actually sends packets of network data rather than text messages and checks the network packets returned, but the effect is the same. If you want to know whether your wireless printer is OK you can ping it, but only if you know its IP address.

Find device IP addresses in Windows

So how do you discover the IP address of devices? There is more than one method and the first is straightforward. Open an Explorer window and select Network in the left pane. This shows NAS drives (often in the Media Devices section), computers, your router (under Network Infrastructure), and printers:

Right click any of these devices and select Properties from the menu that is displayed. Here is a typical Properties window and it is for the BT Home Hub router listed above.

If you are wondering what the Device web page URL is for in the properties window, it is a link to show information about the device or to access its settings. This router is 192.168.1.254 and clicking the link opens the router’s homepage with access to information and settings.

If the IP address in the Properties window is weird, clicking the Device web page link shows the device information or settings and from there you can see the IP address.

Other network devices have a similar properties windows. The IP address of the device is shown or can be accessed from the Device web page. This is handy for routers, NAS drives and other devices that are configured through a web browser.

Find your PC’s IP address

One thing you can’t do is to right click your own computer and get a similar properties window. We need to use another technique.

Hold down the Windows key and press R to open the Run window. Enter cmd and the command prompt window opens. At the command prompt, enter ipconfig /all

This displays a lot of information, but the important one is the IPv4 Address on the active network adapter - the Wireless LAN adapter WiFi in the screenshot above. There are probably multiple network adapters, such as Wi-Fi and Ethernet for wired and wireless connections.

The Default Gateway in the listing above is the router. If you want to access the router, type those numbers into a web browser. My router is 192.168.1.254 but yours could be different.

Ping network devices

Now that we have some IP addresses for devices on the network, let’s ping the router to make sure it is OK. We discovered that the IP address is 192.168.1.254 in the Properties window. So at the command prompt we ping that address:

The important line is the one that says Packets: Sent=4, Received=4, Lost=0. If the device was faulty then packets would be lost, they would take a long time, and so on. It might even say ‘Destination unreachable’. You can see that this device is OK.

View the properties for a wireless printer and get the IP address (go to the device web page if necessary) and then ping it. If the printer is powered on and working OK, ping will report Packets: Sent=4, Received=4, Lost=0. It won’t tell you if there is a paper jam of course, but it at least tests whether it is responding on the network.

Get IP addresses from the router

Routers need to know the IP addresses of devices on the network so that they can communicate with them, allow them to access the internet and other network devices. It is therefore an excellent place to look for devices and IP addresses.

Type the router’s IP address into a browser. You probably need to login with a username and password. This may be on the base of the router or the documentation provided with it.

The menus, features and interface of routers differs from model to model, so I cannot say exactly what to click or where to go. Somewhere is a list of devices with the IP addresses and you can see mine above. The device name is listed and you can easily see the IP addresses.

Watch the network

One last way to discover the IP addresses of network devices is to use a free utility called Wireless Network Watcher. It constantly scans the network and queries the devices found to discover the name, IP address and other information.

It constantly scans and so the list changes when devices are turned on or off or connect to the network. This makes it easy to identify unknown devices because you can turn them off then on and see which IP address disappears and then reappears.

Knowing how to discover IP addresses of devices on your network is useful and it can be used to solve problems. If you manually allocate IP addresses rather than letting the network automatically assign them, it is even more essential to know how to check what device is using which IP address.