How to find the public IP address for my rackconnected cloud server

Every cloud server that belongs to a cloud account that was linked with Rackconnect is going to have a static NAT created on the external network device like ASA firewall or F5 loadbalancer. At the moment there is a problem that there is not an easy way to find out what this IP actually is.

When you first create a cloud server it will have assigned an IP from the cloud public IP address pool. You can find it the example output below.

$ cloudservers --username user --apikey  key  boot rctest --flavor 1 --image 112
+-----------+------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Property |                              Value                               |
+-----------+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| addresses | {u'public': [u'31.222.163.128'], u'private': [u'10.177.69.211']} |
| adminPass |                         rrrrrrrrrrrr                          |
|  flavorId |                                1                                 |
|   hostId  |                 0652da292b44004e3aa76dc80bd912d5                 |
|     id    |                             10209889                             |
|  imageId  |                               112                                |
|  metadata |                                {}                                |
|    name   |                              rctest                              |
|  progress |                                0                                 |
|   status  |                              BUILD                               |
+-----------+------------------------------------------------------------------+

The initial IP of 31.222.163.128 is going to be changed as soon as all  RackConnect task will be run again this cloud server. A next problem is that all subsequent API calls still may return the original IP address instead of the new one assigned by the RackConnect system.

$ cloudservers --username user  --apikey  key show 10209889
+------------+----------------------------------+
|  Property  |              Value               |
+------------+----------------------------------+
|   flavor   |            256 server            |
|   hostId   | 0652da292b44004e3aa76dc80bd912d5 |
|     id     |             10209889             |
|   image    |         Ubuntu 10.04 LTS         |
|  metadata  |                {}                |
|    name    |              rctest              |
| private ip |          10.177.69.211           |
|  progress  |                0                 |
| public ip  |          31.222.163.128          |
|   status   |              BUILD               |
+------------+----------------------------------+

Problem

How do I find the external IP address that Rackconnect assigns to my cloud server.

Solution

Once the cloud server is built you can open a browser from the cloud server (may by a bit of a problem) and try to google for: what's my IP.

Alternatively you can have a bastion server that you know how to login over SSH and from there try run run over internal IP address of your new cloud server his command:

mybastion$ ssh root@10.177.69.211 "curl  http://icanhazip.com"
11.138.183.11