You only need your MAC address if you are staff requiring a fixed connection.
There are a number of methods you can use for finding out the MAC address of your Ethernet card or wireless card. The MAC address is usually printed on the card itself, or comes with the documentation for the card.
The MAC address is a 12-digit hexadecimal number made up from the numbers 0 to 9 and letters A to F. It is usually split into 6 pairs of 2-digit numbers, separated by colons or dashes, e.g. 08:00:20:02:90:4c, but the separator characters should be removed when using it for registration.
Note: the MAC address is not the PPP Adapter address, which some systems will also present. PPP Adapter addresses always begin with 44 and end with 00.00: we do not want that address.
The standard program winipcfg will tell you the MAC address but you must have TCP/IP installed first (TCP/IP will almost certainly be installed on a pre-installed machine). Run winipcfg in an MSDOS command prompt, the MAC address is labeled Adapter Address.
The standard program ipconfig will tell you the MAC address but you must have TCP/IP installed first (TCP/IP will almost certainly be installed on a pre-installed machine).
Select Start - Programs - Accessories - Command Prompt. Then in the command window type
ipconfig /all
The MAC address of an Ethernet card is called the Adapter Address, whilst a wireless card is called just that.
For Mac OS X you can find information on how to find your MAC address on the Mac Support pages.
For Mac OS versions with Open Transport, the MAC address is displayed in the TCP/IP control panel. To see the MAC address :
The MAC address is displayed as the hardware address
For machines without Open Transport we recommend a program called getmyaddress which will return the MAC address along with other information about your machine.
Open a terminal window and type /sbin/ifconfig -a, this will list all of the network interfaces on your machine. The MAC address for each interface is labeled HWaddr.
linux# ifconfig -a
eth0 Link encap:10Mbps Ethernet HWaddr 00:A0:24:9D:16:81
inet addr:128.240.3.219 Bcast:128.240.3.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:578679 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:807411 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:792477749 (755.7 MiB) TX bytes:789840817 (753.2 MiB)
Interrupt:217 Base address:0xec00
The MAC address of this machine is 00A0249D1681
You can find the MAC address on Unix machines in a similar way to Linux. The name of the ethernet interface is usually different, for example on Linux it is eth0, but on Sun OS and Solaris it is le0 or ie0 and on HP/UX it is lan0.
To find the MAC address use the ifconfig -a command and look at the output for the relevant interface. For example :
sunos4# ifconfig -a
le0: flags=863<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,MULTICAST>
inet 128.240.3.15 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 128.240.3.0
ether 8:0:20:3:e7:4a
Here the MAC address is 08002003e74a, note that SunOS and Solaris miss off the leading zero on each pair of characters and that you have to be logged in as root to see the MAC address.
To find the MAC address on HP-UX, use the lanscan command. For example :
$ /etc/lanscan Hardware Station Dev Hardware Net-Interface NM Encapsulation Path Address lu State NameUnit State ID Methods 2.0.2 0x08000935C99D 0 UP lan0 UP 4 ETHER
The MAC address of this machine is 08000935C99D