IP Networking

Hi all,
One of my computers (an iMac) was recently stolen, but I have been able to connect to it over the internet through Apple's 'back to my mac' feature. In order for the police to find these people they need to know the IP address of the stolen computer.

I suspect that I will have find the IP address through the terminal, so I was wondering how a UNIX user would go about finding the IP address of a computer that they have mounted as a disk image? (sorry if I am using Mac terminology here rather than Unix terminology).
Are there any log files that would list the IP addresses that have been accessed recently? (the computer has since disappeared, so this would be the preferred method)
If not, how would I find out what the IP address is when I am next able to access it?
I understand that the Mac OSX may do things differently to pure UNIX, but hopefully there are enough similarities to allow me to do what I need. My knowledge of how UNIX/the terminal works is undoubtedly very poor compared to most of the users of this forum (i.e. I only use UNIX for some very basic work on the supercomputers at university), so please do really spell it out for me!

Thanks in advance!

I'm not familiar with the operating system of Macs but I know they're unix based. I would use ifconfig -a to tell me what ip address it's configured to if I was on a unix or linux box.

Hope you can get it back.

Amazing! I hope you get it back.

Once you know what the IP address is by the command above, you could also run 'tracert'(windows) or 'traceroute'(unix/linux) from the PC you are connecting from to try and help the law enforcement officials locate the device.

It will also be helpful to give them the MAC address of your laptop, as this information can sometimes be critical. (looks like this 00:00:00:00:00:00, should be in the ifconfig -a output..)

If you can get a shell on this MAC laptop, it might also be worthwhile to put something in a startup script somewhere after the network is connected to e-mail you this information. At least that way whenever they turn it on, you get an e-mail containing this data. Not sure where this would be on a macintosh though. (perhaps /etc/rc3.d..?)

Good luck!

The problem with ifconfig is that it will tell you the LAN IP address your MAC is connected to.
I don't know what kind of programs there is on a MAC, but if you have at least mail, wget and a basic shell, and if you know how to code a simple script that you can send to your MAC (via ssh, ...), write a script that wget to a site that returns your current IP address (Current IP Check for example) and send this page to your email address.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
FILE=/tmp/ext_ip

wget -T3 -qO$FILE http://checkip.dyndns.org/

mail -s 'My MAC address' youremail@adress.com << EOF
$(cat ${FILE})
EOF

exit 0

I didn't test the script above, but I hope it can help you a bit
If you can send this script to your machine via SSH or anything else, set the executable flag and use cron (or similar on MAC) to execute this script every hour or so, you'll receive regular emails containing the current (external) IP address of your MAC.

Or tukuyomi's solution rewritten as a one-liner (may be easier to implement: Just cut and paste it on the command line in a terminal window):

Code:

wget -qO- http://checkip.dyndns.org | mail -s 'My MAC address' youremail@adress.com

You can try my ip and mac address to detect you ip and mac address. see if that helps you.

OSX doesn't come with wget. I compiled wget for OSX once but only as a PPC version... I do think OSX comes with curl though. I'm not too sure on the details on how to use curl but 'curl http://site.com/path/to/file' at least should do what you expect.