Hello folks,
I wonder if someone can enlighten me on this please. I checked my IP at whatismyip.com and it reported it as 87.113....... However, delving into the workings of my router I found the following in its log file
Nov 20 20:56:52> WAN IP address 87.113.nn.nn
Nov 20 20:56:52> WAN gateway 195.166.nn.nn
both these IP's are from my ISP Plusnet.
In particular I was wondering why the 195.166.... was not a local private IP. From the IFCONFIG listing I noticed that the 195.166.... IP is assigned to the wireless device. The router creates a bridge for the eth0 and tiwlan0 devices. Is this a waste of an IP or is it something more sinister such as Big Bro is watching??? Perhaps I'm just being Paranoid?!?

I think 87.113.x.x is your public-facing IP. 195.166.x.x is probably hardware owned by your ISP and located at one of their facilities. It may be a DNS server or some kind of central router, switch, etc. In any case it's probably nothing to be worried about.

It might become clearer if you run a 'traceroute' to some website or another; you should get a listing of every ip packets go through (...there may be more than you think...this is normal...sometimes you get a load of asterisks where either the answer goes astray or is supressed, and that is normal too) and you will probably be able to identify a lot of those at each end.

Way, way back in the day when I used to use dial-up, I used Plus Net and they were pretty incompetent at networking (their nameservers were an exemplar of unreliability and slowness...you may think, given its inherent slowness, its is difficult to slow down a dial up connection appreciably, but Plus Net certainly had that technology cracked...hope that doesn't apply to more modern offerings from them), so if there is something odd, it is almost certainly a cock-up rather than a conspiracy.