How to find ethernet / MAC address on Linux

By angsuman, Gaea News Network
Sunday, September 20, 2009

In Linux networking is easy, you just have to know how. We will discuss below how you can find your own machine’s MAC address for all the attached ethernet cards as well as MAC addresses on other machines in the network.

How to find Ethernet / MAC Address of ethernet cards in your machine

ifconfig -a

In the output look for lines starting with eth0, eth1 etc. You will find an entry like this:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:17:31:2B:A3:7C

The ethernet address is at the very end (shown here in italics) for the Ethernet card eth0.

Normally each machine has one ethernet card. However there could be multiple ethernet cards designated as eth1, eth2, eth3 etc.

You can similarly find the MAC address for each.

How to find Ethernet / MAC address of other machines in your intranet

arp

You will have entries in the form:

Address                  HWtype  HWaddress           Flags Mask            Iface
172.16.0.69              ether   00:19:D1:3E:DD:9C C                     eth0

Not only can you get the MAC address but also the associated IP address and network interface of the machine this way.

Discussion

Sana ul Haq
June 9, 2010: 6:42 am

Respected!!!

I have installed fedora core 7 on my three PCs and then configure internet on them. On two of them Internet is working properly……while on one it does not detect the MAC address and internet is not connected. your response in this regard will be highly appreciated.
Let me tell u the Ethernet port is not detected!!!!!
and when I probe for MAC address, the following error appears: [Errno 19] no such device

December 23, 2009: 11:15 am

thanks for posting

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