Ways to find MAC Address

Network and System administrators are many times caught is issue of finding MAC address of some remote device in network. Physical validation of each device may be time consuming and very tedious activity. In this post we will discuss 3 commands in “Command Prompt” which can help to find out MAC address of remote device in few seconds.

Commands to find MAC Address:

The 3 commands in discussion are stated below –

Command 1 – ARP

“ARP” is a Layer 3 protocol which is used by computers to resolve and track the TCP/IP and MAC address of the destination devices that you’re communicating to.

Steps to determine the MAC Address of a remote system –

• Open MS-DOS using “CMD” command
• Ping IP Address of device whose MAC address needs to be discovered.
• Issue “ARP – a” to view the list of IP address and Physical (MAC) Address corresponding each IP –

Below is an example –

Command 2 – Nbtstat

“Nbtstat” command is another way to find out the MAC address of remote machine. NBTSTAT is a Windows built-in utility for NetBIOS over TCP/IP used in Windows system.

Below is One way of determining the MAC address of a remote system is to type nbtstat -A remoteaddress at a command prompt where remoteaddress is the IP address of the remote system

Steps to determine the MAC Address of a remote system –

• Open MS-DOS using “CMD” command
• Issue “nbtstat – a <remote  address> ” (where <remote  address>  refers to remote device IP Address) to view the Physical (MAC) Address of remote system

Below is an example –

Command 3 – Getmac

It’s the command line utility that returns the MAC address along with network protocols associated with each address for all network adapters from local or remote computers.

Steps to determine the MAC Address of a remote system using “Getmac” command –

• Open MS-DOS using “CMD” command
• Issue “getmac /s <remote  computer name> /u username /p password” to view the Physical (MAC) Address of remote system.

Below is an example –

Related – MAC Address vs IP Address