Difference in Ethernet and Wireless IP addresses?

networking ip lan ethernet ipv4
Lauripops picture Lauripops · Jun 18, 2014 · Viewed 14.2k times · Source

This is probably a pretty basic question with a fairly simple answer, but I was just wondering if anyone could clarify why there is a different IP address for my Ethernet connection and my Wireless LAN connection, rather than just one IP address for the actual machine?

Answer

durbnpoisn picture durbnpoisn · Jun 18, 2014

It's because they are different connections. Each interface, hard wired or wired, will have its own IP address. The IP itself is assigned by your router. If you are concerned with what pool your IP is assigned from, you need to go into your setup utility and see what is allocated for wireless, and what is wired. This same thing would happen if you had 2 ethernet cards in your machine. Each one would have it's own IP.

In other words, the IP is a unique identifier as per device, not each machine. You will have as many IPs as you have devices.

Related questions

Access localhost from another computer not on network

Before you say that it is a dupe, this is not the same as this, this, this or this. My question is how do you do it globally. For instance, consider this. I have EasyPHP running in my computer. At …

Read More
Finding Live Nodes on LAN using Python

I am creating a Messenger which is same as IP Messenger in Python 2.7 and Windows. I want the same functionality as IP Messenger uses in finding the systems running same software over LAN but I am unable to understand the …

Read More
How to get a list of all valid IP addresses in a local network?

Is there a way to get a list of all valid IP addresses in a local network? I mean all IP addresses that each user is using in the network.

Read More