[lug] What's my IP?

[Jeff Schroeder]

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions about how to determine an IP 
address without 'ifconfig'.  Several of the ideas had merit, and I 
passed them along to my friend.

In the end, this exercise is all part of an ongoing intra-office battle 
to see who can hork the other guys' machine the best.  My friend 
managed to get on the system when the other guy (who "fixed" ifconfig 
to report false information) was in the bathroom or something, and did 
a simple "xhost +" to enable X connections from anywhere.  His plan was 
to then have some fun creating random background images remotely, or 
whatever other interesting stuff one can do with network access to a 
running X session.

Of course, when he realized he didn't know the IP address of the target 
machine (and it's not easy to figure it out in an office environment) 
he needed some way to determine it.  Thus the question.

Now I've got to help my friend (who's not terribly strong in Linux) come 
up with some creative aliases for things like 'ls' and 'cd'. ;)

Jeff

P.S. Lest anyone think I was "wasting" the collective brainpower of the 
LUG on such trivialties, the reason I brought it up in the forum is 
simply because I realized that without 'ifconfig' I don't know how to 
determine the IP of the local machine.  In the end, there are several 
ways, but many of them depend on (1) network access, or (2) certain 
software packages.  So I learned something useful, even if the end goal 
is a bit of workplace fun. :)