Your public IP (STUN protocol)

[trancexx]

Usually you get IP info by connecting to some site that echoes your IP address. The bad thing about that method is almost proverbial need of site administrators to make changes to sites or their policies  requiring from you to frequently update your code. Another issue could be caching thingy of the Inet approach.

I did some reading about alternative ways to get public IP, and initially tried with SMTP. This Works great but it's kind of slow and on top of that some ISPs tend to block users on port 25 to prevent spam.

Then further reading lead me to STUN protocol documentation. STUN servers are made to resolve and echo  users' IP addresses, and are often used by VoIP services.

The protocol is extremly simple and everything happens very quickly. Client connects (it's UDP so you Know what Imean), sends request, server replies, client parses the response and IP is there.

RFC5389 describes STUN in details, so knock yourself out, if you are that crazy.

I have found some implementations written in c++ and c sharp, but OMG, some people are just to stubborn and love to write incomprehensible idiotic hundreds of thousands kilobytes of code for something as simple as STUN. That went nowhere for me and gave me only the pain, so I just fall back to RFC and wrote my own client based on documentation.

Function is called STUN_GetMyIP() and you can find example of usage in this little script. It's UDP this and UDP that:

STUN.au3

If something wouldn't work, do say.

Edited June 3, 2014 by trancexx

[jaberwacky]

It's, "knock yourself out."  LOL!

[trancexx]

Yeah sure, and  next thing you'll say is that the earth is round.

Blowing you for that, a kiss I mean.

[guinness]

Very nice indeed.

[jchd]

You win a great big hug! This for sure will find its way into the standard stuff.

Never heard of STUN but I confess I never search much this way.

[JScript]

The response time was very fast compared to _GetIP

Thanks for another excellent code!

JS

[mLipok]

indeed delicious

mLipok

[AdmiralAlkex]

I give it three thumbs up!

[Digisoul]

excellent work, thanks for sharing.

[funkey]

Thank you, great function!

[BrewManNH]

I'm getting a return as if I have an IPv6 address, even though I turned off IPv6 for both network cards on my computer. _GetIP() works correctly though.

[iamtheky]

Great work for sure.   Solving an old ass problem as an intro makes it all the more impressive.

Edited June 3, 2014 by boththose

[BrewManNH]

I forgot to mention, the computer I tested this on is on a corporate network and it may block whatever information/port is being used. If that's the case, this function is useful, but not a replacement for some other method of determining your public IP.

[MHz]

Very nice trancexx. Your code is too.

The router confirms same IP address.

Thinking outside the box... I love that kind of thinking.

[trancexx]

  On 5/30/2014 at 12:52 PM, BrewManNH said:

I'm getting a return as if I have an IPv6 address, even though I turned off IPv6 for both network cards on my computer. _GetIP() works correctly though.

That's because I omitted check for blocked connections.

I'll update the code to return another error number when that happens.

edit:

There, updated.

Edited May 30, 2014 by trancexx

[dmob]

Yeah baby! (sorry couldn't resist)

Thank you for this function. However I cant understand this line:

Sleep(0) ; give it time to process

What does it do? Sleep 0 ms? Please educate me.

[trancexx]

That should have been Sleep(10), but all the same really.

Sleep(0) indeed has special meaning, which means nothing much here. 

Edited May 30, 2014 by trancexx

[JohnOne]

One Ace.

One Bravo.

And a big lovely smile.

Cheers darlin.

[Ward]

Brilliant as usual !!

Like this.

[jvanegmond]

When UDP is blocked, for example in a company network, it can take quite a moment for the function to return. If you instead catch @error on UDPRecv and stop any further attempts to receive data, the function is very fast. The reason is that the blocker will send ICMP replies almost instantly which will trigger an error somewhere in the 10NNN range.

The difference is roughly 3000 seconds for the current behavior vs 100ms when you catch the error.

$bRcvData = UDPRecv($aSocket, 1280) ; never more than 1280 bytes can be returned by the server. Usually is 50-something bytes.
If @error Then ; this server won't work
ExitLoop
EndIf

Edited June 3, 2014 by Manadar