What is the MAC address of the network adapter?

The MAC address is a unique hardware numerical and alphanumeric number that the manufacturer assigns on a permanent basis to each network device being released: network cards, routers, Wi-Fi adapters and others. This occurs at the manufacturing stage - the MAC address is stitched directly into the network device itself and can no longer be changed. However, this address can be changed at the program level - this is called MAC spoofing.

Sometimes a sticker with the necessary information is applied to the device itself (to the bottom of the router or the back side of the network card). The scope of using MAC addresses is various switching network processes. For example, if you need to identify a computer on the network, the switch reads this particular address. But basically MAC-addressing is used to filter and organize access to network resources.

The MAC address is a unique sequence consisting of 12 characters, which are numbers from 0 to 9 and six initial letters of the Latin alphabet, from A to F. Thus, it is written in the form of a 48-bit sequence, divided by 6 bytes And having a hexadecimal form. Bytes are separated by a hyphen or a colon, which is optional, but its presence is still considered more correct.

A typical example of a record is 00: 33: 01: AC: 0F: 11. The first three bytes indicate the manufacturer's code, which is sometimes a confirmation of the authenticity of the product. The first byte of the MAC address of the network device is always 00 (all others are used for broadcast and multicast addressing). The uniqueness of this combination allows you to uniquely identify the desired device on the network and transmit the necessary data only to him.

If you want to know the MAC address of the network device of your computer, you can use one of the methods described below.

The first option (using the command line)

It is suitable for Windows XP / 7 operating systems. First of all, you need to open a command prompt. To do this, click on the "Start" button and then "Run". Then, in the opened window, type "cmd" or "command" and press "Enter".

In the command window, type "ipconfig / all" (without quotes) and press "Enter". As a result, a list of all network adapters on your computer and their properties will be displayed. Information about the MAC address will be located in the line "Physical Address".

The second way

In order to determine the MAC address of Windows 7, you can use the following method. You need to press the "Start" button, select "Control Panel" and go to "Network and Sharing Center", then click on the left side of the " Change Adapter Settings ".

Then select the network adapter you are interested in , and in the right context menu that appears, click "Status". Then click "Configure" and "Details". The MAC address of the network device you are using is located in the "Physical Address" row.