Good afternoon Dear readers and guests of the IT blog Pyatilistnik.org. Not long ago, we jointly discussed the topic “How to find out the IP address of a computer,” and there we briefly became acquainted with the concept of a gateway. In this article I would like to consider in detail the question of what constitutes main gate on your computer and how you can find it out in just a few clicks. This information is always useful when diagnosing problems with your Internet connection. Well, let's get started.
What is the main gateway or Default gateway?
The main gateway is a network device or a special operating system whose task is to transfer network traffic from one local network to another, a process called routing. The default gateway allows devices on one network to communicate with devices on another network. The easiest way to understand the whole process is in practice.
- Let's assume that you have two segments in your organization, one server and the other user. From a security point of view, network engineers separate them from each other so that both segments are autonomous and independent. And so, in order for the user to gain access to the server, he must contact his gateway, which has a route to the server segment, thanks to this the client gains access, the Default gateway in this case acts as an intermediary.
- A simpler way to understand a default gateway is to think of it as an intermediary device between a local network and the Internet. This is necessary to transfer internal data to the Internet and then back. Each of you has an Internet provider at home. Your computer is not accessible to other Internet users, since it is located on your local, internal network or provider network, and is hidden by Firewall and routers, but this does not prevent you from accessing the Internet, since you delegate all these tasks to your main gateway in the system.
This is what the process looks like. Let's assume that my computer is located in Moscow, and I need to access the server from Volgograd. My computer doesn't know how to get there, it doesn't have a route, but it does have a default gateway on the system. The computer asks him how to get to the server in Volgograd. The default gateway looks at its route table and goes to its default gateway or static route and so on until the destination.
You can also read about this on Wikipedia https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_gateway
Communication goodies
Employee communication can be organized not only by telephone and mail
but also via Jabber.
True, few people remember about such a protocol. Web-server:
ICS even has a web-server with PHP support. You can install your own HTTPS certificate if you have purchased one, or specify that the ICS receive free Let's Encrypt.
This is enough to host a business card website or advertising landing page. But you won’t be able to cut into a heavy portal with custom modules. And for me, this is stupid. Still, the gateway must remain a gateway. Flexible configuration of monitoring and notifications. Alarms can even be sent to Telegram. And in the realities of the Russian Federation, it is even possible to send messages through a proxy.
How to Find Your Default Gateway IP Address in Windows
There are many ways to find out the default gateway address in Windows. You can use both built-in methods and special utilities.
Universal method for Windows platforms
- The easiest and fastest method for determining the default gateway is to view the properties of the network interface from the Network and Sharing Center. To open this menu. Press the WIN and R keys simultaneously. In the Run window, type ncpa.cpl and press Enter.
As a result, the “Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections” window will open with a list of your network interfaces.
You can also access these lists through the network icon in the right corner. This method is suitable for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. Right-click on it and select “Network and Sharing Center” from the context menu
Click on the item “Change adapter settings”, after which you will see all your network interfaces.
Now, having selected any of them, right-click on it and select “Status”.
In the status window, click the Details button to view detailed settings. Find the "Default Gateway" option. The IP address of your Default gateway will be shown opposite it. In my case, it is 192.168.31.254.
How to find out the IP address of the default gateway in Windows 10
Since Microsoft is trying by hook or by crook to get rid of the control panel and all its included tools in favor of a new universal interface, Windows 10 has its own method for obtaining information about the default gateway address. This setting is called “Network and Internet Settings”, you can get to it, as before, from the context menu of the network icon.
Or by pressing the WIN and I keys simultaneously, thereby calling up “Windows Settings”. Find there the item “Network and Internet (Wi-Fi, airplane mode, VPN)”
In the “Status” item we find the “View network properties” setting
A new window will open where you will see a huge amount of network data, including the IP address of the main gateway. I have highlighted it with a red line.
How to find out the ip address of the default gateway through the command line
Any system administrator must know the IPCONFIG command line utility. Thanks to it, you can get all the data on the default gateway in Windows, of any version, in a couple of seconds. Open cmd prompt and enter.
ipconfig
As a result, you will receive this information:
- Ethernet adapter Ethernet0:
- Connection DNS suffix. . . . . : root.pyatilistnik.org
- Link-local IPv6 address. . . : fe80::2050:8cd7:31f6:eae8%8
- IPv4 address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.31.51
- Subnet mask . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
- Main gate. . . . . . . . . : 192.168.31.254
Agree that this method of determining the gateway is much faster.
If you want to display information only for Default gateway addresses, then enter the command:
ipconfig | findstr "Default gateway"
How to determine the default gateway ip address via PowerShell
It is logical to assume that Windows PowerShell can do everything as well. Launch the PowerShell snap-in and enter the command:
Get-NetIPConfiguration
As a result, you will receive gateway addresses on all your network interfaces.
What is the difference between IPv4 and IPv6
You may also have noticed while browsing through your settings that there is another type of IP address called an IPv6 address. The types of IP addresses we've talked about so far are the addresses used by the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), developed in the late 70s. They use the 32 binary bits we talked about (in four octets) to provide a total of 4.29 billion possible unique addresses. Although this is a lot, all public addresses have long been “consumed” by enterprises. Many of them are not currently in use, but they are assigned and are not available for general use.
In the mid-1990s, concerned about the potential shortage of IP addresses, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed IPv6. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address instead of the 32-bit address of IPv4, so the total number of unique addresses has grown exponentially and has become quite large (it is unlikely to ever end).
Unlike the dotted decimal notation used in IPv4, IPv6 addresses are expressed as eight groups of numbers separated by colons. Each group has four hexadecimal digits that represent 16 binary digits (this is called a hextet). A typical IPv6 address might look something like this:
2601:7c1:100:ef69:b5ed:ed57:dbc0:2c1e
The fact is that the IPv4 address shortage that has caused concern has been largely mitigated by the increased use of private IP addresses through routers. More and more people created their own private networks using private IP addresses.
How to find out the default gateway through the registry
This method is more for system administrators to understand in which registry branch the settings with network interfaces are located. Open the registry editor and go to the branch:
HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/Tcpip/Parameters/Interfaces/
You will have the GUID names of your network interfaces here, you need to find yours. In the desired interface there will be a registry key “DhcpDefaultGateway”
Or if you have a static IP address, then the key will be called Default gateway.
See the IP address of the main gateway using third-party utilities
In addition to the built-in methods, there is a huge layer of all kinds of network utilities, I will not dwell on them in detail, since there are a huge number of them, I will just give here a few of them, which I myself sometimes use in my practice.
- Piriform Speccy utilities, from the developers of Ccleaner. The utility is free and shows a bunch of information on the equipment in the system; we will be interested in the “Network” tab. Information on your network interfaces will be displayed here. Find the one you need and pay attention to the Gateway Server item, this is the IP address of your gateway.
- Or through the network Inrerfaces View Default gateway utility.
Safety.
ICS has many tools that will allow you to customize the security level according to your requirements: from free ClamAV antiviruses and Suricata intrusion detection systems to Evgeniy Kaspersky products, configuring only through an easy-to-understand web interface.
Even the same irreplaceable fail2Ban can be configured in a few clicks
The ICS can also monitor traffic via the netflow protocol from network equipment without passing traffic through itself.
Finding the Default Gateway on Mac or Linux
On a MacOS computer, there are two ways to find the default gateway: through a graphical program and through the command line. The easiest way to find your Mac's default gateway is through System Preferences . Click Network
select the network connection you are using, then Advanced . Click the TCP/IP and find the IP address next to Router .
Another way to find the default gateway for your Mac is to use the following netstat command through the terminal. To do this, go to Finder > Applications > Utilities and launch the Terminal .
netstat -nr |
grep default Or with the Ifconfig command.
IP address of the default gateway in Android
To find information about the default gateway in Android, you must have an active connection to the Wi-Fi network. Next, open your phone settings and go to “Wi-Fi”
Go to the Wi-Fi connection settings.
And we find the “Gateway” item, this is the address we need.
Can there be two main gateways
Systems may have several network interfaces with their own gateways. This means that one of them must become the main one. Let me remind you that the main gateway is the one through which all network traffic goes by default. In systems with multiple gateways, the primary is determined by the routing table and a parameter such as network metric . The smaller it is, the higher the priority it is, unless of course there is an explicit static route that will have a higher priority. Read about metrics and the routing table at the link above.
This concludes my long article on determining and finding the main gateway in various systems. Ivan Semin, author and creator of the IT blog Pyatilistnik.org, was with you.
Benefits of use
This technology has a number of advantages:
- Improves routing efficiency . Data is sorted into internal (local) and external (intended for external servers). If the endpoint is unknown, then the so-called default network gateway is used.
- Login and password are regularly both on the LAN and outside it, which helps to increase the security of the connection.
- The administrator has the ability to configure traffic by direction and volume.
- Data is protected from spam , hackers and unauthorized use. The gateway acts as a “checkpoint” and protects information in both the forward and reverse directions.
