6

The first several digits of a MAC address (Ethernet ID) are specific to its manufacturer/model. I won't ask what's the best way to look these up since it's subjective... but I'd love to know if any here has found a particularly efficient resource to do this.

username
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2 Answers2

11

When online I use MAC_Find: - it's helpful if you're only looking up one or two.

If you're wanting to look up a larger amount or a list of MAC addresses it will be easier to run a script to grab the line (using grep or something similar) from IEEE's OUI List. Note that the oui.txt file seperates the MAC address by dashes rather than colons.

To make life a bit more fun here's a shell script to get the manufacturer's from whatever arp will give you:

#!/bin/sh

# Get Mac Addresses, add missing 0s, only grab the first 8 characters, change to dashes and uppercase
arp -a | awk {'print toupper($4)'} | sed 's/^[0-9A-F]:/0&/g' | sed 's/:\([0-9A-F]\):/:0\1:/g' | cut -c 1-8 | sed 's/:/-/g' > /tmp/arp.txt

for line in `cat /tmp/arp.txt`
    do
    echo `grep $line /PATH/TO/oui.txt`
done

rm /tmp/arp.txt

Example Output:

00-00-5A (hex) SysKonnect GmbH
00-00-5A (hex) SysKonnect GmbH
00-03-93 (hex) Apple Computer, Inc.
00-17-F2 (hex) Apple Computer
00-17-F2 (hex) Apple Computer
00-0A-95 (hex) Apple Computer, Inc.
00-11-24 (hex) Apple Computer
00-16-CB (hex) Apple Computer
00-11-24 (hex) Apple Computer
00-17-F2 (hex) Apple Computer
00-16-CB (hex) Apple Computer
Chealion
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    I've been using Coffer's tool over IEEE's for years. Since it supports 3 different MAC display formats I find it more useful. The only format I use that it doesn't support is Cisco, i.e. 0011.2233.4455. The IEEE web form, however, only supports hyphens, whereas most command line tools use colons. – Scott Pack May 26 '09 at 17:52
  • Going between the different formats is a PITA - hence the shell script I just added as part of my edit. – Chealion May 26 '09 at 18:19
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    Yeah, I have written a small python script using regular expressions. Time to share it with the world: http://omploader.org/vMXFrNg/macreformat.py – hayalci May 26 '09 at 19:50
  • @hayalci - Nice! – Chealion May 26 '09 at 21:06
4

The first 6 bytes of a MAC address represent the OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier). These are administered by the IEEE, so I find it best to always go to the source:

http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml

Murali Suriar
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