MAC Address

networking United States
  • 15 years ago

    A MAC address starting with the letters CA was strying to connect to my laptop.  I'm only used to seeing MAC addresses starting with numbers or letters starwting with CE.  Can I tell anything from the CA part of the MAC?
    Thanks,
    Josh


  • 15 years ago

    I don't think you would get any useful information from the MAC address, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.


    Main thing is to check your security and encryption is strong.

  • 15 years ago

    I disagree with that statement as a generality, you can often learn a lot from a MAC address. The first three bytes of a MAC address are assigned by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to the manufacturer of the network device and are referred to as Organizationally Unique Identifiers (OUIs). OUI's can be easily looked up to determine who manufactured the device. In fact, there are several online tools to identify the owner of a MAC address, such as http://www.techzoom.net/mac/index.asp. If you want to look at the whole listing of assignments you can download those at http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml.


    In addition, there are a few user-compiled lists floating around that have specific ranges for different devices from vendors to further identify devices by their MAC. For example, the HP assigns different MAC address ranges for jetdirects, LAN cards, switches, etc. so you can often determine not only the manufacturer but also the type of device (and in some cases, the model).


    One thing to keep in mind is that it is possible that the original MAC was changed since many devices allow you to change  the MAC address. If that is the case then  novavb6 would be absolutely correct in that the MAC would not give you any useful info.

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