Hi, I hesitate to post in this absolute car-crash pointless thread, but with this it's going even further off the rails.
On Sun, Sep 21, 2025 at 08:57:32AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote: > On 9/21/25 8:22 AM, John Hasler wrote: > > Ask on a RaspberryPi forum. Raspberry Pi OS is derived from Debian but > > they make changes. > > I suspect the term "debian" is being misapplied here. > > 192.168.0.213 is in an address space associated with routers.[1] > [1] https://www.findip-address.com/192.168.0.213 I *think* what you are trying to convey (and I have to say *think* with extreme stress because as usual it is very hard to discern what you actually mean in any of your emails) is that this page you used says that the IP address is commonly used by routers. And so, I imagine you are thinking, perhaps the OP is actually trying to talk to some home router and not the Raspberry Pi they were assuming it was? Hence your comment that "debian is being misapplied". Phew, what an effort. If only there had been some way to make parsing that easier. The broad idea that the OP should check that 192.168.0.213 is really their Raspberry Pi is a good one. This is one of the few pieces of information they've managed to forcefully get across though so they seem sure. They should probably let us know what makes them so sure, so we can all double check and be on the same page. I don't have high hopes that communication will get that far. There are several problems with what you've said though. For a start, that web site returns that same text for every single address within 192.168.0.0/16: https://www.findip-address.com/192.168.8.9 https://www.findip-address.com/192.168.81.92 https://www.findip-address.com/192.168.35.4 So that immediately calls in to question whether the information on it has any relevance to the thread at hand. Literally all that page is doing is saying, "oh, RFC1918 IP address? Might be your local router" and it's saying that FOR ALL 65,536 IPs IN THAT BLOCK. Now while every (connected) IP network has a default route, usually the number of non-router devices on the segment outnumber the number of routers quite considerably. This should be fairly obvious when you think about any typical home network setup. There's a router, but then there's multiple computers, desktops, phone, entertainment systems,, refrigerators, … By your assertion, any person taking the IP address of their new smart personal massage wand that Amazon just delivered into that web site would come away thinking it was actually some kind of router, and unlikely to soothe any form of muscle tension. IPs in that range are NOT "an address space associated with routers". Routers can be on any IP address just like non-routers, and there are more non-routers than routers. Unfortunately your post likely hasn't contributed anything at all but misdirection for the OP and anyone else wondering what OP's 192.168.0.213 is. > The address of my T-mobile WiFi hotspot is 192.168.0.xyz . By which it follows that every device using that hot spot as a router ALSO has an address like 192.168.0.xyz¹, so you haven't established any equivalency between your hotspot and OP's mystery device. I think you've said in the past that there is only one device ever using your hotspot, but that doesn't matter: that just means the equivalency could be that OP's mystery device is like your desktop (or whatever). The actual equivalency seen here is more general in that "OP's device is on a private RFC1918 network address, like mine are." This is so general as to to not be interesting or specifically useful to OP here. Now, hopefully I've convinced you that the idea that the whole of 192.168.0.0/16 is "associated with routers" is not accurate, but of course there is such a thing as default values set when things are manufactured and so on. While routers, like other network devices, can use ANY valid IP address, overwhelmingly they will be used on private RFC1918 networks. When defaults are chosen, there are popular ones like 192.168. … 0.1 … 0.254 … 1.1 basically numbers very near the start or the end. If OP had come along with 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.254 and you'd said, "these are addresses that home routers often pick, are you sure it isn't that?" that would have been perfectly reasonable. That web site though… hoo boy Thank you for coming to my TED Talk Andy ¹ This is an over-simplification. In the general case the hosts and the default gateway have to be in the same network space. There are obscure ways around that. The device I am sending this from has a global IPv4 address but only an IPv6 address as a default route, so that's not even the same address family! -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
