First of all let me welcome you to our site. All of us here hope you enjoy your stay and we hope you return soon. Over the past few months we have seen our traffic grow and we have noticed a few trends. Many of you get here through search engines, and most of you are searching for one thing specific, your computers MacAddress. For those who have never heard of such a thing, the MacAddress in a computer is a unique identifier that allows a network to differentiate between multiple network cards. It is one of the lowest level identifiers on a network and is supposed to be completely unique.
So in order to help you out, after all we do not want your search to be in vain, I am going to write up a simple way to find out information about your systems MacAddress. I will also link to other useful sites with information beyond what I will discuss here.
First question we see a lot:
How do I get my computer’s MacAddress?
This question is a bit tough to answer simply because there are many different types of machines. A lot of this depends on what operating system you are running.
In Windows 9x you can find your MacAddress quite simply. Click your start button and then click Run. On the line there type WINIPCFG. A window will popup there that will give you some basic information about your computers network information. It is important to not that this is an informational window only, you will not be able to change any information in this window. If you click on the Details button at the bottom of the window it will open a more detailed view of your network settings. Verify that the Adapter listed in the drop down menu is your ethernet card and not the PPP Adapter that it defaults to. you should be able to find the Ethernet Address on this screen. It is a 12-digit number divided into 6 pairs, e.g. 00.11.22.33.44.55.
In Windows NT/2000/XP this is done differently. You have to get the information from the command line. In order to do this you should click on Start and then Run. In the Run box type in cmd and press enter. This will open up a command prompt. On that screen type ipconfig /all and press enter. This will list all active adapters in your machine and all their settings. You will need to find the section for your Ethernet Adapter and listed under that will be a line that looks like this:
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-11-22-33-44-55
That is your MacAddress.
If you are using a Macintosh you would find this information a couple of different ways.
If you are running OS 9 or earlier you could choose open the TCP/IP control panel from the Apple Menu. Once open Click File and then Get Info (or type Command-i). In the resulting box you will find your MacAddress. Once again it will be a 12 digit number divided into 6 pairs, e.g. 00.11.22.33.44.55.
Under OS X you can get this same information either from the GUI or the Command Line. I will show you how to do it through the GUI. Open a finder window and go to your Applications folder, usually denoted by a large A over a folder. In there open up the Utilities folder and double click Apple System Profiler. Under the System Profile tab, expand Network Overview by clicking on the triangle/arrow. In there you should be able to find the Ethernet Address.
I am not going to go into the many UNIX methods to retrieve your MacAddress, but as a hint, many flavors of UNIX use IFCONFIG to get that information. Your mileage may vary though depending on your version of UNIX.
A Coupleof links to more information on the MacAddress of your computer.
Definition of:
FreeNetworks Link.
A visual Discussion of what I covered above at DSLReports.