Quick question about determining IP address

[Bad^Hat]

Hey chaps. I'm trying to mess with my ports to fix some latency issues, but as usual my puter doesn't want to agree with me. I'm trying to determine my current IP to change it from dynamic to static, but the command prompt (typing ipconfig /all) is giving me some conflicting info. My IP address on there is always listed as "10.1.1.x", which, to my knowledge, can't be right. However, when I go to a "what's my current IP address" type site, or to my routers page (http://10.1.1.1), I get a more normal looking one starting with 2xx. I'm willing to trust that one, but I also need some other things to start (following portforwarding.com) - Subnet Mask, Default Gateway, and Name Servers - and I'm wondering if it isn't just as likely that they could be incorrect on command prompt aswell.

Bear with me if this is a noobish question, I'm only qualified for family tech support ^_^

 

[Link]

Don't worry, the info in ipconfig is correct.

Every PC on your internal lan will have a "private" IP address. This IP is only valid inside your LAN. You then have a "public" IP address, which is what the outside world sees. This is why, as far as your computer is concerned, it has an address of 10.1.1.x, where the rest of the net has a 2xx address.

Default gateway is the IP address of the device thats directly conected to the internet connection, so in this case, your router, which will be 10.1.1.1
Subnet Mask - prob 255.255.255.0, but go with whatever ipconfig tells you, as that will be correct.

For port forwarding, you should only need the IP address of your computer, the 10.1.1.x - What you are aiming to achieve is that any data sent to your public IP on a given port is sent to your PC.

"Technical bit" - Because you only have 1 public IP address on your network, any information that is sent to any of your computers on your network, needs to be sent to the correct computer by the router. The way most aps do this is by using a specific port. Say you port forward port 5000, this means that you are telling the router that any traffic thats addressed to port 5000 should be sent to the "private" ip address of you computer.

What this means is, that to port forward, you only need 2 things. The port number you want to forward, and the "private" (internal) IP address of the computer you want that traffic forwarded to.


Now that you've read all of that, I should point out that there is very little chance that port forwarding will fix any of your latency issues, because port forwarding is for connections initiated outside of the private network.