Is the CheckUser extension able to find someone's information apart from their external IP address? I.e., can it find the internal IP, the physical MAC address or the computer name of an editor?
Topic on Project:Support desk
No. Such information is not transmitted over the internet so there would be no way for checkuser or any similar type of thing to know it.
checkuser records the folliwing info:
- user-agent (web browser, OS and sometimes language)
- ip
- x-forward-for (if the user is using a proxy, what is the ip address before the proxy. Whether or not this is supported depends on the proxy)
Hello @Bawolff, thanks for your answer! I wonder, if such information is not transmitted over the internet, then how come some websites such as this one are able to detect my internal/local IP?
And regarding the proxy, just to make sure I understand well: If a user connects to a wiki and edits pages throughout a proxy server or a VPN, can the CheckUser tool tell what is the "real" IP address used by this user (i.e. not the IP of the proxy/VPN)?
It may or may not be able to tell you the real ip address of the user - some proxies are configured to send that information along, other's are not. It depends on the proxy.
As for the site you linked. That's using WebRTC to find your local IP address, which is a relatively new API. The local IP address is not transmitted in general, but javascript is able to find it on browsers supporting WebRTC. CheckUser does not have support for obtaining this information. Collecting it would be a bit more invasive, as you would have to actively collect it instead of just recording what the browser sends by default.
Normally local IP is not that interesting, as most of the time its either a private IP address (starting with 10. or 192.168) which is kind of meaningless as they are often dynamically assigned and a great many people use the same one, or its simply the same as the person's public address.
This information (the local IP revealed on the website you linked) is not sent through HTTP headers, it's available only on the browser currently running the page (this information is not transmitted over Internet), so no, it's not available to CheckUser.
OK, thanks !