The Omega’s IP Address

Every machine on a network has a unique identifier, known as an IP address. Just as you put an address on a letter to send in the mail, computers use an IP address to send data to specific machines on a network. An IP address is 4 sets of numbers separated by periods. These numbers range from 0-255, and the format of an IP address is as follows:

123.456.789.001

More commonly, you’ll see the leading 0’s being cut off resulting in a shorter IP Address

123.456.789.1

You may want to know your Omega’s IP address if you don’t have Apple’s Bonjour Service to find the hostname omega-ABCD.local, or if you want to guarantee that there won’t be a mix-up between hostnames (IP addresses are unique, hostnames are not).

Because IP addresses are specific to the network to which you are connected, the Omega has two main IP addresses: one for the wireless connection, and one for it’s own Access Point. To learn more about the Omega’s various connections you can read our article on the Omega and Wireless

Finding the IP Address when Connected to a WiFi network

We will outline two methods for you to find the IP Address of your Omega when connected to an existing WiFi network. These use two different commands, but they yield the same results. The first command is ifconfig, a common Linux utility for monitoring network interfaces. The second command is ubus, a special OpenWRT command that provides communication between various daemons and applications.

Finding your Omega’s IP Address with ifconfig

You can use the ifconfig command to get information about all the network interfaces on your Omega. We are going to use it to get the IP address of the apcli0 interface, which is used to connect to the internet. Type ifconfig to see the full list of interfaces and the information pertaining to them.

To narrow down your result to just the IP address we can use grep. The grep command allows you to isolate your output based on keywords or patterns. We are going to isolate the address line so that we have easy access to the IP address of our Omega with the following command:

ifconfig | grep apcli0 -A 1 | grep inet

Your command-line output will look something like this:

root@Omega-2757:/# ifconfig | grep apcli0 -A 1 | grep inet
          inet addr:192.168.1.111  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

And your IP Address is what follows the inet addr:. My Omega’s IP address is 192.168.1.111.

Finding your Omega’s IP Address with ubus

You can use the ubus command to find information about your network devices. Type the following to bring up the full status of your wireless wide area network (WWAN):

ubus call network.interface.wwan status

This will show you all the information about your Omega’s apcli0 device, which handles the WiFi connection of the Omega.

To narrow down your result to just the IP address we can use grep. The grep command allows you to isolate your output based on keywords or patterns. We are going to isolate the address line so that we have easy access to the IP address of our Omega with the following command:

ubus call network.interface.wwan status | grep -w "address" | grep -v -

The result should look similar to this:

root@Omega-2757:/# ubus call network.interface.wwan status | grep -w address | grep -v -
                        "address": "192.168.1.111",

My Omega’s IP address is 192.168.1.111. I can connect to my Omega with this IP address, and send data to the Omega from my device.

Finding the IP Address of the Omega on it’s own AP

We will outline two methods for you to find the IP Address of your Omega on it’s own AP. These use two different commands, but they yield the same results. The first command is ifconfig, a common Linux utility for monitoring network interfaces. The second command is ubus, a special OpenWRT command that provides communication between various daemons and applications.

If you connect to your Omega’s WiFi (connecting to the network called Omega-ABCD), it will have it’s own IP address. The Omega’s IP Address on it’s own AP is 192.168.3.1 by default, but we’ll go over how you can change this.

Finding the Omega’s IP address on it’s own AP Using ifconfig

You can use the ifconfig command to get information about all the network interfaces on your Omega. We are going to use it to get the IP address of the br-wlan interface, which handles the Omega’s AP. Type ifconfig to see the full list of interfaces and the information pertaining to them.

To narrow down your result to just the IP address we can use grep. The grep command allows you to isolate your output based on keywords or patterns. We are going to isolate the address line so that we have easy access to the IP address of our Omega with the following command:

ifconfig | grep br-wlan -A 1 | grep inet

Your command-line output will looks something like this:

root@Omega-2757:/# ifconfig | grep br-wlan -A 1 | grep inet
          inet addr:192.168.3.1  Bcast:192.168.3.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

And your IP Address is what follows the inet addr:. My Omega’s IP address is 192.168.3.1.

Finding the Omega’s IP address on it’s own AP Using ubus

You can use the ubus command to find information about your network devices. Type the following to bring up the full status of your wireless wide area network (WWAN):

ubus call network.interface.wlan status

We can narrow this down further using grep. The grep command allows you to isolate keywords or patterns in your output. We’re going to use it to isolate the IP Address of our Omega.

ubus call network.interface.wlan status | grep -A 2 ipv4 | grep -w address | grep -v -
root@Omega-2757:/# ubus call network.interface.wlan status | grep -A 2 ipv4 | grep -w address | grep -v -
                        "address": "192.168.3.1",

Here we see that on my Omega’s Access Point, the IP address designated to the Omega is 192.168.3.1. If I connect to the Omega-2757 WiFi network on my computer, I can communicate with my Omega using this IP address.

Changing the Omega’s IP Address on the AP network

To change the Omega’s IP address we can use uci, a command-line tool that allows us to edit configuration files with simple commands. The command to modify the IP address of your Omega is the following:

uci set network.wlan.ipaddr=<IP ADDRESS>

For example, if we wanted to change the Omega’s IP Address to 192.168.9.1 we would enter the following:

uci set network.wlan.ipaddr=192.168.9.1

Now once we have set our IP address, we’ll want to save this. The command to save a setting is the following:

uci commit <CONFIG>

The config we’re changing is network, so we’ll enter the following to save our changes:

uci commit network

Now once you’ve saved your settings, you’ll need to restart the network to apply the changes with this command:

/etc/init.d/network restart

And that’s all there is to it. Your Omega’s new IP address on its Access Point is now 192.168.9.1. You can change this back to the default in the same way that you modified it.

The devices connected to your Omega’s AP are assigned an IP address that has the same subnet as the Omega. If you connect your laptop to the Omega-ABCD network, your laptop’s IP address will be 192.168.9.X, where X is a number from 2-255.