We can find mac address (physical address) of a computer using the command ‘getmac‘. This can be used to get mac address for remote computers also. Below are few examples on how to use this command. It works on XP, Vista, Windows 7, Server 2003 and Server 2008 operating systems.
Get mac addresses from CMD
At the command prompt, type 'ipconfig /all' without quotes. (space between g and /) Alternatively, if using Windows XP, you can use the command 'getmac'. Your MAC Address is listed under 'Physical Address' as a series of 6 groups of two digits, letters and numbers, separated by dashes, such as in the image below. Make sure you get the physical. To view the MAC address without Command Prompt, use these steps: Open Start. Search for System Information and click the top result to open the app. Expand the Components branch. This command is used to logically change the mac address of an interface. Router(config-if)#mac-address AAAA.AAAA.AAAA. In this example, we will change 2611XM’s Fa0/0 to have a mac address of AAAA.AAAA.AAAA.
The Physical Address: This is a 12-digit number also known as the MAC Address of your Network Adapter. The Transport Name: This is the location of the Network Adapter. If you see Multiple MAC Addresses listed, you may want to run another command to see more details. In the Command Prompt, type the following command and press the Enter key.
Just run the command getmac to get the mac addresses. Find an example below.
This command does not show mac addresses for the network connections which are disabled. You can run ncpa.cpl and check which NICs are disabled. Further, I have received comments that this command does not help identify the mac address for a specific device. For example, if I need to get the mac address for my WiFi card, output of getmac command is not helpful. We can use ipconfig command to deal with this.
Get mac address of a remote computer
We can retrieve the mac addressses for a remote computer using nbtstat command.
Example:
Alternatively, We can run the below command to retrieve the mac addresses of a remote computer.
remote_computer : Full name of the remote computer or IP address
username and password are of the account on the remote computer.
Example:
If you do not want to specify the password, you can skip /p parameter. You will be prompted to enter the password and the command execution will take place after that.
Errors:
Using getmac command we can retrieve the mac addresses of the machines running windows OS only. If you try this for a Linux machine you would get the error “The RPC server is unavailable.”
If you provide incorrect password, the command would fail with the error message “Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.”
Ping For Mac Address Command
Also Read:
Windows CMD commands reference