In Ruby, how does one get their IP octet without going through DNS?

Question

I can, on some of my systems, get my IP address (192.68.m.n format) by doing this:

addr = IPSocket::getAddress(Socket.gethostname())

...the trouble is that this only works if the name the local machine uses for itself is the name the DNS server associates with it.

How *&#( hard can it be for ruby to just return its primary interface's IP address? I have to do this in a platform-independant way or I'd just call ifconfig or ipconfig and parse it.

Answer 1

http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/get-your-local-ip-address/

EDIT: 6th result when you Google "ruby get IP address."

Answer 2

See this question. Also see Socket.getaddrinfo()

Answer 3

How about this

require 'socket'
ipaddr = UDPSocket.open {|s| s.connect('65.59.196.211'); s.addr.last }

the IP address can be anything that is real (this is the I got for stackoverflow.com), but it should be an IP address reachable on the interface you want to get the IP address for. Since its a UDP socket, no connection is actually attempted, but it does try and figure out what interface to use.