Obtaining Your MAC and IP Addresses

MAC Address

A MAC address (also known to Windows users as the Adapter Address or Physical Address) is an ethernet card's unique identifier. No two ethernet cards in the world are manufactured to have the same MAC address. Note that an IP address is different from a MAC address. You can think of an IP address as a unique host identifier across a WAN (Wide-Area Network), such as the Internet, while a MAC address is a unique identifier for a network card on an ethernet LAN (Local-Area Network). The instructions below guide you through the process of obtaining both of these addresses on Windows PCs.

1. Click the Start button, then click Run..., then type the word command as shown below and click OK.



2. This will open the Command Prompt window and display the following:

Microsoft(R) Windows DOS   (C)Copyright Microsoft Corp 1981-1999. C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>

3. Enter

   ipconfig /all
   

   You should see something similar to the output below. The output includes a wealth of networking information, including your PC's IP address, its DNS hostname, its gateway, and its MAC address (a.k.a. Physical Address).

C:\WINDOWS\Desktop> ipconfig /all Windows 2000 IP Configuration Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : andromedapc Primary DNS Suffix . . . . . . . : Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcast IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : ece.northwestern.edu Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix. . : ece.northwestern.edu Description . . . . . . . . . . . : SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-03-BA-04-C1-67 DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 129.105.5.204 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 129.105.5.210 DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 129.105.5.1

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