MAC addresses are used in the local network while IP addresses can be used to identify network devices all around the world. Method 1: How to Find Your MAC Address in Windows 10 with Command Prompt. Finding Your Internal IP (OS X 10.5 and Newer): Click on the Apple icon on the upper-left corner of.
For starters, MAC Address stands for Media Access Control Address. It is used as a unique identifier for your device on network interfaces like wireless networks (Wi-Fi) and Ethernet connections. To further break it down: you know how network providers use your phone's IMEI number to identify your device on their networks, MAC address performs the same function but for all things internet-related.
These MAC addresses are built-in or burned-in addresses, and like IMEI numbers, no two devices have the same MAC address. That is why they are a very effective means of identifying devices on network interfaces. Their structure can get confusing.
In this article, we will walk you through some uses of MAC addresses for wireless network connectivity and how you can find the MAC addresses of your devices — mobile and PC.
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Using MAC Addresses
Primarily, MAC addresses are used to identify devices connected to your home or office network. While you can use device names to identify devices connected to your network, the MAC address is a more accurate identifier.
Say you have two friends over at your place, and their smartphones (iPhone X and OnePlus 7) are connected to your home internet. Blocking either of them might be difficult because both devices would not appear as iPhone X and OnePlus 7 on your router admin panel. Instead, they would be identified by a weird-looking combination of 12 alphanumeric characters grouped in twos by a colon or a hyphen.
So instead of seeing iPhone X or OnePlus 7 on your router dashboard, you will most likely see something like this: 23-78-98-A8-8P-6C or 75:8A:8B:48:12:54. These are typical formats for MAC addresses.
Ip Address On Mac
Another use-case of the MAC address is for unblocking a device from your Wi-Fi network. If you have numerous devices that you have blacklisted from your home or office internet, whitelisting a device would be difficult if you don't know its MAC address.
Additionally, if you have a router that lets you prioritize internet traffic by devices through Quality of Service (QoS) settings, knowing the MAC address of your devices is also important. That is because you can only add a device to the QoS rules or priority networks of your router using its MAC address.
Now that you know what a MAC address is, what it does, as well as it uses, check out how to identify the MAC addresses of your mobile phone and computer.
Finding MAC Addresses
1. How to Find MAC Address on Android
Step 1: Launch your device's Settings menu.
Step 2: Tap 'Network & Internet' option.
Step 3: Tap Wi-Fi.
Step 4: On the Wi-Fi settings menu, tap the name of the Wi-Fi device you are connected to. Alternatively, tap the gear icon.
Step 5: Tap the Advance drop-down button.
You should see your device's MAC address (under the Network details section).
2. How to Find MAC Address on Windows PC
Method 1
Step 1: Tap the Wi-Fi icon on the system tray/taskbar.
Step 2: On the network, you are connected to, tap Properties.
Step 3: Scroll to the bottom of the network settings page, and under the Properties section, you should see your computer's Wi-Fi MAC address.
Method 2
Step 1: Type in cmd into your Windows search bar and tap Command Prompt on the search result.
That launches the Command Prompt application in a new window.
Step 2: Type or paste this command ipconfig /all into the Command Prompt console and hit the Enter button.
That will display a bunch of network configurations in the console.
Step 3: Under the 'Wireless LAN adapter Wi-Fi' section, check for Physical address to see the Wi-Fi MAC address of your Windows computer.
3. How to Find MAC Address on iPhone or iPad
Step 1: Launch the Settings menu on your iPhone or iPad.
Step 2: Tap General.
Step 3: Tap About.
Step 4: Scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the Wi-Fi address. That is the MAC address of your iOS device.
4. How to Find MAC Address on Router's Admin Panel
You can also remotely check for MAC addresses of a device from the admin panel or dashboard of your Wi-Fi router.
Because there are several brands of routers, each with varying configurations and settings, we cannot provide accurate steps for checking MAC Addresses on your router's admin panel. We recommend that you check the device management section of your router. You should find a couple of devices connected to your Wi-Fi alongside their MAC addresses.
Note: We also recommend checking the instruction manual or online documentation for your router on the manufacturer’s website to determine how to check connected devices and their MAC addresses.
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Take Control of Your Network
You can identify devices on your network using MAC addresses. On top of that, you can manage your network quality by filtering out unwanted devices, assigning better QoS settings, prioritizing traffic, etc. However, you can do all these effectively only if you know the MAC addresses of devices hooked to your network. Follow the steps above to check the MAC address of your Android and iOS phones as well as your Windows computer.
Next up: Ever wondered what an Internet Protocol address (IP address) is? We explained everything you need to know in the article linked below.
The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.Read NextGT Explains: What is an IP Address and Difference Between a Static and Dynamic IP Address?Also See#iphone #network
Did You Know
Windows 10 is the last Windows since Microsoft is changing the approach of building and delivering OS.
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Find Ip By Using Mac Address
Learning has never been so easy!
As a Network Administrator/Engineer you may be asked to find MAC addresses and/or IP Addresses, hopefully this can make your job a little bit easier. These commands work on most Cisco Switches and Routers but sometimes the commands can vary from device to device.
Find Ip Address Using Mac Address
5 Steps total
Step 1: Connect to your Cisco Devices
Find Mac Address For Ip On Network Router
Connect to the Switch/Router by using a console cable or a terminal emulator like Putty or Secure CRT. If you are successful it should look something like this.
Find Mac Address For Ip On Network Security
Step 2: Find The MAC Addresses
On the layer 2 device (switch) enter the username and password if needed. Next enter 'enable' mode on the switch by typing enable. Next type the command 'show mac address-table'. If successful it should look like the picture. It's worth noting that on some Cisco devices the command 'show mac-address-table' also works.
Step 3: Find the IP Address
On the layer 3 device ( L3 switch or router) in my case I am using a router, enter the username and password if needed. Next enter 'enable' mode on the router by typing enable. Next type 'show ip arp' if done correctly you should get an output similar to the picture.
Step 4: Filtering the results on a Router
Find Mac Address For Ip On Network Security
In the example I have provided there were only 9 IP addresses. However in the real world there could be dozens or even hundreds of IP addresses. To help filter the results on a router type 'show ip arp ?' You will see gigabitethernet' as an option this will let you filter results by interface or sub-interfaces. In my exmaple it typed 'sho ip arp gigabitEthernet 0/0.10' and that listed all IP's on my sub-interface.
Step 5: Filtering the results on a Layer 3 Switch
As stated in Step 4, you will likely have more than 9 IP Addresses. This can be made worse in a messy closet with a 48 port switch running the closet and maybe even some layer 2 switches under that. Luckily in addition to being able to filter by interface you can also filter by VLAN. So type in 'show ip arp ?' and you will see 'vlan' as a listed filter. As you can see I typed in 'sho ip arp vlan 20' and it listed only those IP's in vlan 20. In this case it was the vlan interface and a PC.
I hope this guide was helpful for you. If you aren't sure about something or feel like I missed a step, please let me know.
9 Comments
Anaheim
GDBJNC Apr 27, 2018 at 01:15pm
Great post.
Another way to find that information is to first PING the address of the system you are looking for. Then issue: show arp | i .
This will then show you the MAC address associated with the IP address.
Then issue: show mac address-table | i
This will give you the port that the device is currently connected.
Cayenne
Jim6795 Apr 27, 2018 at 01:15pm
Thanks for posting this *after* I finished a 'What's Connected Where' jihad on our network. :^D After beating Google to death over it, hoping for some useful tool, I ended up using exactly the same process (plus the online MAC address lookup to ID the device manufacturer), so I can affirm this works perfectly, if you work it.
As you can see, the 'sh arp' or 'sh ip arp' commands also give you the MAC addresses, so essentially the 'sh mac add' is only to get the port in which the device is connected. It helps to Ping the subnet's broadcast address (e.g. '10.1.1.255') to load the ARP table. (Small tip: When you see a large number of MAC addresses showing up on a single port, there's a switch on that port into which those MAC addresses are connected. If you're all Cisco, 'show cdp neighbor' (or 'sh cdp nei') will get you to the next switch. Also, 'sh ip arp | i 0/24' will show just the MAC address(es) on that port.)
The amazing thing to me is, this far into the 21st Century, this is still the only way I could find to get this information -- i.e. to find out what's connected where. Did I mention it's a *lot* of work?
(ETA: What if you can't get to the Console port? How do you get the IP address of the switch in order to SSH or (if you must) Telnet in?)
Datil
CrimsonKidA Apr 27, 2018 at 02:04pm
Good stuff, thanks for posting this! My go-to Cisco command is: show ip interface brief (show ip int bri). Another thing I've learned that is very helpful (I'm still a noob with Cisco stuff) is tab-completion and using a '?' after the start of a command, such as 'show ?'
Cayenne
Ed Rubin Apr 27, 2018 at 03:09pm
Unfortunately dumping the mac table and working through it is the only way to reliably find stuff and identify its switch port. I've done a similar process with HP switches. One thing that helps a lot is an ip scanner application that does MAC vendor ID lookups for you. This can help with jim6795's problem of identifying an undocumented switch IP since you can look for the the switch maker's vendor ID and then try ssh or telnet, or http/https depending on the product.
Jalapeno
TS79 Apr 27, 2018 at 06:53pm
Spiceworks has the ability to harvest this information using SNMP and will create a map showing which device is on which switchport. It must have the correct MIB installed for your switch and you must configure SNMP. The feature could use some more work but basic components are there.
Jalapeno
SadTech0 Apr 27, 2018 at 08:06pm
Thanks for posting this *after* I finished a 'What's Connected Where' jihad on our network. :^D After beating Google to death over it, hoping for some useful tool, I ended up using exactly the same process (plus the online MAC address lookup to ID the device manufacturer), so I can affirm this works perfectly, if you work it.
As you can see, the 'sh arp' or 'sh ip arp' commands also give you the MAC addresses, so essentially the 'sh mac add' is only to get the port in which the device is connected. It helps to Ping the subnet's broadcast address (e.g. '10.1.1.255') to load the ARP table. (Small tip: When you see a large number of MAC addresses showing up on a single port, there's a switch on that port into which those MAC addresses are connected. If you're all Cisco, 'show cdp neighbor' (or 'sh cdp nei') will get you to the next switch. Also, 'sh ip arp | i 0/24' will show just the MAC address(es) on that port.)
The amazing thing to me is, this far into the 21st Century, this is still the only way I could find to get this information -- i.e. to find out what's connected where. Did I mention it's a *lot* of work?
(ETA: What if you can't get to the Console port? How do you get the IP address of the switch in order to SSH or (if you must) Telnet in?)
Couldn't you just use CDP? #show cdp nei detail will show you the ip of the connected devices.
Thai Pepper
TaylorC Apr 27, 2018 at 08:45pm
Hey everyone thanks for the great feed back, it's really cool having this featured. @SadTech0 if you cant to the console port and you don't know the IP Address you could use a tool like angry IP scanner and find the switch that way. CDP may or may not work depending on your network configuration and/or topology. Barring some major obstruction you should try to console in get the ip and start an inventory. Hope that helps.
Thai Pepper
Todd_in_Nashville Apr 30, 2018 at 12:34pm
Keep in mind, in some security minded environments, CDP may be disable if it's not needed. It's one of those things that give out unnecessary reconnaissance info to the bad guys. If one of your edge routers gets compromised, it can be used to start footprinting your internal network.
Thai Pepper
John3367 Apr 30, 2018 at 08:51pm
Great info..
Another helpful thing you should add!
SHOW INVENTORY ---> To show the SERIAL number of the Cisco device you are on.
**I always use those commands you show to troublshoot. They are very helpful. I usually PING an IP address. then I type a 'show arp' and get its MAC address.. then I will type 'show mac-address table' which will show me which PORT the device is connected to!