The hardware address (also known as the Ethernet, physical, or MAC address) is a 12 byte hexadecimal number that is unique to the Ethernet card on your machine It will often be displayed in one of the following formats:
Sometimes leading 0's are omitted. For example, 08-00-2B-BC-31-DC and 8-0-2B-BC-31-DC refer to the same hardware address.
How to determine your computer's hardware address
On a computer running Windows 7
- Press the Start button, type cmd, then press Enter to start up a command shell
- Type ipconfig /all
- The hardware address will be listed under "Physical Address"
On Mac OS X
- Select "System Preferences" from the Apple Menu.
- Select Network
- Select your Ethernet adapter from the menu on the left
- Click the Advanced button
- Click the Hardware tab
- The hardware (MAC) address will be shown below.
- Run /sbin/ifconfig -a
- The hardware address for each Ethernet interface will be listed in the output after the string "HWaddr".
- Become root.
- Run /usr/sbin/ifconfig -a
- The hardware address for each Ethernet interface will be listed in the output after the string "ether".