how to find the mac number

is there an easy command to be able to find the mac address on wireless cards?
i have mac security on my wireless network, and my parents have their friends saty here when they come into town, or they have their students work here and of course they bring their laptops and whant to get online. so how can i easily found out a mac address? and will it work for all computer, dells, sony, toshiba, macs?

thanks

 

Do you want to find the mac address of the computer from the computer itself? If so then ipconfig /a (windows) or ifconfig -a (*nix). Or do you mean you want to be able to see which wireless cards are currently connected to an Access Point or router? If the latter, there should be a page on the router config which will show all currently connected devices.

 

If I were you I would just use WPA security instead. All you do is set a password on your wireless router, then to get online you can either tell them the password or put it in for them.

 

im using wep and a mac filter. to find out out what their mac adddress is for the wireless card, i just type in ipconfig /a?

 

Drop to a command prompt first, otherwise you wont actually see the read out

Start-> Run
CMD <Enter>
ipconfig /all

You will get a read out like this
Windows IP Configuration

Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : Laptop
Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . :
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Unknown
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No

Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Dell Wireless 1370 WLAN Mini-PCI Car
d
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-90-4B-D6-4B-2F
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.5
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : 27 November 2005 09:35:52
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : 27 November 2005 10:35:52



The bit I put in bold is what you are looking for.

 

As Nimbu said.

If you have more than one network adaptor, just look under the description of the network adaptor you want the mac address for.

 

thanks, i know what numbers im looking for, i just wanted an easier way to do find it.

thanks

 

If you know the IP address of the machine with the MAC you want to know, and have another machine handy, ping it, then run "arp -a" in a cmd prompt, will list the IP address's you have accessed along with the MAC's for said IP's, just snag it from that list.

Forsaken.

 

i think i will just use the comand nimbu told me.

thanks for the help

 

or just right click on your network connection and choose status, choose the support tab at the top and then the details button if you are connected or even if you arent you should see the physical address and you dont have to type in commands if you are lazy

 

i would always do it like this, but i dont know how you can get to status when you are not connected, it doesnt let me on the computers/laptops ive seen. ill try this again later since i am truely lazy. thanks