WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 43256298

The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, has died

284 points| lieuwex | 1 year ago |ip4only.me

91 comments

order

toomuchtodo|1 year ago

> In Kevin’s own words on kevinloch.com: “I am also an amateur physicist, programmer, photographer, independent film producer (at WTF Productions) and AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego).” Kevin was also passionate about any and all things space related: the sky, the stars, and beyond; trying to find the meaning in how things work, why they work, and what would make them work better. His latest passion after moving back to Reston was soaking in the skyline from the rooftop of his apartment building and bicycling the paths of Reston and beyond.

https://www.loudounfuneralchapel.com/obituaries/Kevin-Loch/#...

https://bsrender.io/

https://nensus.com/kl-net/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lAuXWARqt8

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10414562/

rrr_oh_man|1 year ago

PSA: Lego turned evil, unfortunately. There are much better alternatives on the market these days.

lxgr|1 year ago

Oh no, this has been my go-to site for connectivity tests (as example.com seems to be cached fairly aggressively by my browsers and that has misled me in the past). Ad-free, minimal, does exactly what it needs to and nothing more.

Rest in peace!

Edit: All these (great and much appreciated!) responses of alternatives are making me wonder if this should in fact be a standardized service that could then be offered as a public good in a similar way as pool.ntp.org.

Checking for generic Internet connectivity (i.e. not only having an IP address, but being able to reach public sites, these sites being non-cached, not-captive-portaled etc.) seems like a problem that too many apps, scripts, and devices are solving again and again.

PhilipRoman|1 year ago

ifconfig.me is a similar service which I often use. It has a nice feature that if you do "curl ifconfig.me", you'll get only a string with the ip address, no markup.

freedomben|1 year ago

I've been using ipinfo.io now for several years and have been very pleased with them.

You can `curl https://ipinfo.io/` and get a JSON blob back with info on your current IP. If you pass an IP explicitly you can get info back on it, for example `curl https://ipinfo.io/104.26.7.98`. Easy to combine with jq also for use in scripts: `curl https://ipinfo.io/104.26.7.98 | jq -r '.ip'`

For personal use it's free, and they have reasonable pricing for large volume. No affiliation on my part, just a happy user.

wizzwizz4|1 year ago

If you have the resources to maintain it, you can contact the estate. (They'd like to sell the domains, so unless they're bundled with Brickshelf the highest bidder will probably be a traffic-farming company or something, but you never know.)

aeries|1 year ago

For services like this, I always use my own domain which can easily be re-mapped or hosted myself. E.g. "checkip.mydomain.com"

merb|1 year ago

I use ip.me it's not add free, but in curl you can have an ad free version by doing curl -4 ip.me or curl -6 ip.me since it will only send the ip when it detects curl I guess.

Havoc|1 year ago

You can also use dig to get your external ipv4. That prevents reliance on smaller sites

Don’t have the command on hand but easily searchable

Szpadel|1 year ago

I usually use `curl ifconfig.me`

kachapopopow|1 year ago

checkip.amazonaws.com is my goto, not as short tho :/

evulhotdog|1 year ago

ip.guide is also a great one. Provides a json payload with relevant information. I have no affiliation with it, just happy user!

tusslewake|1 year ago

https://kevinloch.com/

sedatk|1 year ago

> Note: This website will be disabled by 3/1/2025. Website content will be relocated to nensus.com/kl-net

So much for leaving a legacy with your domain name.

jmclnx|1 year ago

I never heard of ip[46].me but the site is very informative.

RIP Kevin Loch

narmiouh|1 year ago

RIP Kevin, thanks for the fish!

atentaten|1 year ago

He was relatively young; what was the cause of death?

easterncalculus|1 year ago

RIP Kevin. These websites no doubt helped thousands of people over the years.

If anyone is looking for an alternative site to check their v6 and v4 addresses, check out this one here:

https://ip6.biz/

lemcoe9|1 year ago

ip4.me and related websites actually inspired me to create a more-whimsical version of the website, which I call ipkitten.com. Not only do you get your IP address, User Agent, and approximate geolocation, but you also get a kitten GIF!

It also works from the command line, like this:

  $ curl ipkitten.com
  4.2.2.2
I am sure that Kevin has saved engineers and other IT people tons of headache and time with his simple, helpful, and ad-free tools.

cjcampbell|1 year ago

Don’t know where I first discovered it, but I have been using ipkitten for years when working with non-tech friends, family, and clients. It seems to help with the intimidation filter of getting into the weeds, so thank you!

I didn’t realize it was command line friendly!

f30e3dfed1c9|1 year ago

I like that this prints the IP address followed by a newline. some similar services don't and it's sort of annoying.

iJohnDoe|1 year ago

Kudos for his contributions.

Lots of solutions out there. I like wasab.is https://wasab.is

curl wasab.is curl wasab.is/json

F_r_k|1 year ago

RIP Kevin. Used these sites a lot!

I hope they give then to a charity/charitable person. I proposed to continue the service ad free, for free to them. Hopefully they accept my proposal. It would be such a shame for the service to become "enshittified" by some greedy company

SuperSandro2000|1 year ago

5 points on that some scammer is going to buy the domains and doing shady things with it.

homebrewer|1 year ago

A reminder that you do not need websites or an HTTP client to learn your public IP:

  dig @resolver1.opendns.com myip.opendns.com TXT +short
  dig @ns1.google.com o-o.myaddr.l.google.com TXT +short
dig can be replaced with any DNS lookup utility (nslookup, drill, etc).

Polizeiposaune|1 year ago

The former should be

  dig -4 @resolver1.opendns.com myip.opendns.com A +short
  dig -6 @resolver1.opendns.com myip.opendns.com AAAA +short

jayknight|1 year ago

Unless you're on a network that blocks all dns traffic not to their own dns servers.

xrd|1 year ago

The open DNS query failed for me with: "Query A or AAAA for your source address as seen by the resolver" But, the google nameserver did work. Thanks!

roygbiv2|1 year ago

Really rolls off the tongue, going to put it with my useful numbers like 0118 999 881 99 9119 725 3.

silverquiet|1 year ago

> The Kevin M Loch Estate will be shutting down Kevin's websites in the near future (4/1/2025).

All respect to the deceased, but there's always at least a tiny part of me that is suspicious of anything taking place on April 1.

whizzter|1 year ago

Could simply be that a bunch of invoices/billing are connected to months and they don't want to pay beyond the current month (to make sure they get their money for the domains).

forgotpwd16|1 year ago

Were those addresses used for anything or simple domain squatting?

lxgr|1 year ago

They were great memorable and ad-free sites that simply showed you your own (or your NAT's) public IP, as seen by the HTTP server.

F_r_k|1 year ago

To know your IP

GJim|1 year ago

I'm puzzled why you have been downvoted for asking a genuine question (and all credit to those who have taken time to respond to you).

Perhaps the downvoters would care to explain their actions?