I am currently working for a tech support company. I want to set up a script for our phone system that will check and see if a person's IPhone is powered on, and if not move to the next person in the escalation list. Or possibly try alternative numbers that we don't want to give out to the customers. (Personal cells, and in a real emergency there home number.)

I tried getting the IP address of my phone from what's my IP .com but I can't seem to ping that number.

:(

asked Mar 25 '12 at 19:35

4 Answers 4

In most cases (all?) an iPhone is going to be behind a NAT router/gateway of the 3G cellular provider that phone is connected to. Therefore the iPhone will not have a public IP address that you can ping. If the phone is connected to a WiFi network its likely to be acting as a NAT router as well and stop ICMP (ping) packets from reaching the device.

You're not going to be able to approach your problem from this perspective. Perhaps looking more at the Apple supplied "Find My Phone" would prove to be more productive.

answered Mar 25 '12 at 19:41

1

  • Many operators provide special M2M sims which get public IP address.

    May 7 '14 at 8:33

You can try the opposite. Create or buy a background-capable location based app which updates a database when the device is on and the app is live. Then just check the time stamps in the database.

answered Mar 25 '12 at 19:54

4

  • An "You can" is always better than a "You can't." I suppose I could right my own app to ping in the opposite direction. Ha, ha... I was thinking about myself primarily, my battery is always dying on my phone. Perhaps I could include the current battery level in the app so I can put the status "Dead Battery" up.

    Mar 25 '12 at 21:49

  • @NoMoreZealots fair enough, but the question was to ask if an iPhone could be "pinged".

    Mar 26 '12 at 0:27

  • @Damien : I just tried, and within my local WIFI LAN, the answer was yes, the iPhone responds to an ICMP ping to its local IP address. Not sure if this will work on cellular if you just happen to be connected to the same cell tower. Past a NAT firewall, no.

    Mar 26 '12 at 1:55

  • @hotpaw2 Even if connected to same cell tower; you won't be able to ping an iPhone. The phone company will route all iPhone traffic through a NAT gateway to save on public IP addresses. Different story for those 3G usb-dongle devices - they usually are allocated a public IP address for the time they are live. Your suggestion around re: a specific app is a good one but you would be relying on the user running the app and iOS watchdog not stopping it if memory conditions on the phone get tight. In practice it wouldn't be reliable in for this type of situation.

    Mar 26 '12 at 3:47

I just tried against an iPhone Xs Max OS 13.3 on the same Wifi network as my Macbook. I checked the iPhone IP on its display, this is just to test the "ping the iPhone" concept.

  • ping <IP> does not work
  • but this works nmap -Pn <IP>.

answered Jan 13 '20 at 1:02

If you dont mind jail breaking iPhone. You can install openSSH and try ssh for each iphone. Problem with this is they must be in the wifi network.

answered Mar 25 '12 at 19:48

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