Recently, I saw icanhazip.com pop up in my pFsense firewall logs. It was immediately blocked but the name piqued my interest, so I did a little digging which revealed an interesting backstory.

It’s owned by Cloudflare:

spoiler

spoiler

…but it hasn’t always been theirs: icanhazip: How a simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users. Pretty interesting, at least to me as I have never encountered it before.

I have it still blocked as nothing I’m doing seems hampered by blocking icanhazip.com’s ip range. Anyone else ever encounter icanhazip.com?

  • hexagonwin@lemmy.todayEnglish
    11·
    4 hours ago

    i always use curl icanhazip.com for checking my external IP… iirc some “IoT” devices also use it for some reason

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      some “IoT” devices also use it for some reason

      I haven’t conducted a thorough investigation, but the last container I added was SpeedTest Tracker and I am assuming that it’s using icanhazip.com and ifconfig.co to determine the best test servers based on my locale. I chose my own servers when I set it up. For the time being, I have both blocked and nothing seems to complain. SpeedTest Tracker still crons ever hour with success.