How i change my ip address to a given address and access a website

Question

How to change ip address such that it does not reveal our original address when using $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; in php

Answer 1

There are several options I have in mind for this. I will go from the simpler to the more complicated one.

• First, you could use a proxy server and ask him through an HTTP request made by your program or your browser, to fetch a resource for you. The proxy server will take the role of querying a resource in your place to the target service.

  Example :

  You want to retrieve the main page of the domain stackoverflow.com. You ask the proxy server to ask stackoverflow's HTTP server to send him the main page and he will forward it back to you.

  To SO webserver, the superglobal $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable will correspond to the proxy server's IP address and not yours. However, the HTTP protocol implements some fields such as HTTP_VIA, HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR, or HTTP_FORWARDED which can be used to know if the current HTTP request is made by a proxy or not.

  A transparent proxy will not specify those fields and will not modify your request whereas a non-transparent proxy may reveal the original IP address of the original requester. You got to use a reliable proxy which will act as you intends it to act. Another thing to consider is the use of an SSL tunnel between you and the proxy to avoid eavesdropping.

• The second solution is to use a VPN (Virtual private network) server. It would be too complicated to fully explains how this works, but remember this, when you are connected to a computer using a VPN service (like l2tpd, pptpd ...) it's like you were on the same LAN with this computer. So you can transparently make requests to a webserver and he will never find out what's your real IP address.

• A third solution could be to use linked nodes based network such as TOR. It's a free network you can connect to, and you will be completely anonymous to regular people. The TOR network power is to provide a network of many nodes and each nodes doesn't know anything about other nodes, so even people connected to the TOR network cannot know anything about you. I suggest you to read more about this if you're interested.

There are more complicated other solutions such as TCP session hijacking which is generally used to fake IP addresses and literally steal another computer's TCP connection, but this is out of the scope of this answer.

Answer 2

You need to use a proxy server if you're trying to access a website from a different IP than your own. Wikipedia has more information.