if I write 'ipconfig' command in windows 8 command prompt I get lots of physical address under several heading like "wireless lan adapter wi-fi", "ethernet adapter ethernet 2" etc. Under each of these heading there is a physical address and it is completely different from another.
And again if I write 'getmac' command I get a list of 6 physical addresses. I don't understand which one is the real physical address of my laptop. Please let me know how can I find which one is the real mac address of my laptop. Thanks
A laptop doesn't have a MAC address. MAC address is a property of a network interface, such as LAN, WiFi etc. Therefore it is correct that you get different MAC addresses for different adapters.
If you just want to know the MAC address of the adapter currently in use, you can (in Windows 7):
Right-click the connection icon in the system tray
Open Network and sharing center
Next to Connections, click on the connection name.
In the Status window that appears, click Details...
You should then see the physical address of this specific adapter.
You can find screenshots here.
Related
While launching ipconfig /all, I can see the description and the physical address (MAC address) of the computers on my computer:
...
Description : Intel ...
Physical address : 48-4D-...
...
Description : Teamviewer VPN adapter
Physical address : 00-FF-...
From the description, I can see which MAC address belongs to my PC and which one belongs to the VPN adapter.
Can I also find this out without reading the description? Is there a way to distinguish VPN related MAC address from "real" ones? (A Windows API answer is preferred, if possible)
There are databases for the MAC addresses, for example from Wireshark.
Since my powershell is utterly bad, I just wrote a small program to iterate over this list and check for a match in the file by Wireshark.
You may check it out and modify as you want: https://github.com/maio290/MacChecker
If no vendor is found for the device, I guess you can assume that this device is a virutal one.
I studied that MAC addresses are physically printed on network card in the computer, and i also know that there can not be two identical mac addresses in the same network LAN. Now my doubt is:
What happens if there are two Devices with the same MAC address in the same LAN? I think this can happen because even if products print different addresses on the cards, there are software tools with which you can change the MAC address. Is someone's connection blocked or what? Thank you.
I've really benefitted from all the answers out here and now it's my turn to ask for help.
My company uses CISCO VPN. They won't give me the Shared Secret for the group so I am forced to use the windows VM to connect to my work network.
I've tried using the MAC CISCO ISPEC but there it is. Anyway, I'd like to use the connection in my windows vm from my MAC side. I tried setting up a openVPN server on the windows and connecting to that from MAC and connect the CISCO vpn. All a no go.
So any suggestions will be very welcome.
Thanks all.
Well it might sound strange but you're going to have to setup 2 virtual NICs on the virtual machine. The first NIC is going to be bridged with the real physical NIC on the OSX box and that's going to be your outside interface. The next virtual NIC is going to be a host-only and this is going to be your inside interface. This is the one you'll use for OSX to connect through your windows machine. Then you'll need to remove all IP and DHCP configuration from your physical NIC on OSX to let the virtual machine use that NIC.
Every time you want to use the VM and the VPN you're going to have to remove the config on your physical NIC in OSX and then re-add it when you're done.
The windows machine will need to use internet connection sharing to allow OSX to use its VPN connection.
I've been trying write an application which will be able to connect to a network device via rndis or over wifi and perform some simple operations.
The kicker is that I want to be able to find a device I've connected to before, through either connection method. I initially figured I'd just check for a previously seen mac address, but I discovered that the rndis mac address and the wifi mac address don't match. I'm on windows so the next thing I tried was to use nbtstat -A and ping -a, but those didn't turn up anything unique either (I figured I might get a device name, but it doesn't seem to have one).
So my question is, is there any tool (ideally available for windows), which will allow me to retrieve some sort of unique information about a network device that will allow me to find it again? I don't have a huge amount of experience in this field so I'm not sure exactly what that would be, but I hoped that there may be a way to get the mac addresses for both network adapters while only connected to one, or perhaps use a different tool to find a device name that I'd missed.
Thank you for any advice you might give, I really appreciate it. Sorry if I'm overly wordy.
EDIT: In case I've been ambiguous. I am connecting repeatedly to an external device via RNDIS or WIFI from my desktop PC. My goal is to be able to consistently recognize the network device regardless of the connection method used.
EDIT: By networked device, I mean that I have small independant devices (such as cell phones or tablets) running a unix os, which I access from my Windows desktop via wifi or rndis, and that I would like to be able to consistently identify. So for example I might want to use this tool to connect to one of two cell phones and be able to recognize which one it is so I can recall previous operations performed with that device. So what I'm looking for is a unique (or semi unique) attribute of the cellphone available to me that is consistent when accessed via rndis or wifi.
You can get MAC address (and bunch of other network interface info) with built-in ipconfig command and parse its output later:
ipconfig /all
Alternatively, if MAC address is all you need, try getmac.
Windows 7 has a (neat?) new feature called a 'virtual wireless adapter'. Read about it here:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090516/windows-7-native-virtual-wifi-technology-microsoft-research/
I have an application that directly controls the windows wifi interface card using the Native Wifi API ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms706556%28VS.85%29.aspx ). Please take as a given for this question that I need to directly control the wifi adapter using this documented api and can't just leave it up to OS and user.
The Windows 7 virtual adapter is supposed to be included with any approved Windows 7 wifi drivers. The drivers that out there now seem to be pretty buggy, and I've found that unless I manually disable the virtual wifi adapter the real adapter will not reliably connect to a wireless access point when commanded by the WLAN api.
My main question is 'How to I detect the presence of a windows virtual wifi adapter?'
Note that the documentation for WlanEnumInterfaces says:
This virtual device normally shows up
in the “Network Connections Folder” as
‘Wireless Network Connection 2’ with a
Device Name of ‘Microsoft Virtual WiFi
Miniport adapter’ if the computer has
a single wireless network adapter.
This virtual device is used
exclusively for performing software
access point (SoftAP) connections and
is not present in the list returned by
the WlanEnumInterfaces function
.
I suspect there is shell api that might provide the enumeration that the control panel uses to display the virtual adapter.
For extra credit, how can I disable this adapter programatically?
Thanks in advance.
To detect the Windows 7 virtual adapter with the WLAN api you need to use the version defined by wlanapi.h in Windows SDK version 6.1.
You can enable or disable network adapters by using WMI or the INetConnection COM interface defined in netcon.h .
In the control panel > Network and Internet there's an option that says: "add a wireless device". I used that to detect the microsoft virtual wifi miniport adapter, cause after I installed Windows 7 it didn't appear in the network adapters but it was there and enabled, but not started.
To disable it from a command prompt run as administrator you could try:
netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=disallow
(or disallowed, I haven't tried). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd815243%28VS.85%29.aspx