Networks

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Mac Address / IP Address

0 helpful
6 replies

by joezep1

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.
It seems to me if you can Ping an IP address there should be a way to get the Mac address of the Nic card associated with that IP address. I had thought by now there would be a utility out to assist in doing this. Someone had said you can get the mac address by using arp -a. , but only if you are on the same subnet. Any assistance here would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again. Have a good one!!

6 replies

by shmaltz

You will not be able to get someone elses MAC address of that person is not located or your network.
Since the way IP routing works is that it uses for a remote computer the default gatway (or any other route you added) it will put in the Gatways MAC address in order to reach the remote computer.

by rkelly

Answer one is perfectly correct - IP is a routed protocal and you can only query for MAC address on the local network. This behaviour is due to ARP being a broadcast based protocal, so it is not propagated across routers.

A simple way is to use the System Information MMC Snap-in and focus it on the remote machine. This works quite well with Windows Nt4 and 2000 based machines.

by rkelly

The above answer works if you have a Windows 2000 Machine, if you have an NT 4 machine use NT Diagnostics and focus on the remote machine instead.

This discussion is closed to new replies.