Below are listed the most common computer operating systems and how to discover their wired MAC address.

Windows

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.
• In the command window type ipconfig /all

The MAC address of an Ethernet card is called the Adapter Address, whilst for a wireless card is called Wireless Address.

Macintoshes

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,

• Open the control panel
• Select user mode from the edit menu
• Choose the advanced option
• Select info from the main control panel

The MAC address is displayed as the hardware address.

Linux

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. The wired interface is likely labeled eth0.

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

Some versions of Linux use the command ip addr,

$ ip addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: ens192: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:50:56:3a:36:90 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.64.4.4/22 brd 10.162.7.255 scope global ens192
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

 Here the MAC address is 0050563a3690

Other Unix Machines

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