A nice tool to look up make/model via MAC address?

Question

The first several digits of a MAC address (Ethernet ID) are specific to its manufacturer/model. I won't ask what's the best way to look these up since it's subjective... but I'd love to know if any here has found a particularly efficient resource to do this.

Answer 1

When online I use MAC_Find: - it's helpful if you're only looking up one or two.

If you're wanting to look up a larger amount or a list of MAC addresses it will be easier to run a script to grab the line (using grep or something similar) from IEEE's OUI List. Note that the oui.txt file seperates the MAC address by dashes rather than colons.

To make life a bit more fun here's a shell script to get the manufacturer's from whatever arp will give you:

#!/bin/sh

# Get Mac Addresses, add missing 0s, only grab the first 8 characters, change to dashes and uppercase
arp -a | awk {'print toupper($4)'} | sed 's/^[0-9A-F]:/0&/g' | sed 's/:\([0-9A-F]\):/:0\1:/g' | cut -c 1-8 | sed 's/:/-/g' > /tmp/arp.txt

for line in `cat /tmp/arp.txt`
    do
    echo `grep $line /PATH/TO/oui.txt`
done

rm /tmp/arp.txt

Example Output:

00-00-5A (hex) SysKonnect GmbH
00-00-5A (hex) SysKonnect GmbH
00-03-93 (hex) Apple Computer, Inc.
00-17-F2 (hex) Apple Computer
00-17-F2 (hex) Apple Computer
00-0A-95 (hex) Apple Computer, Inc.
00-11-24 (hex) Apple Computer
00-16-CB (hex) Apple Computer
00-11-24 (hex) Apple Computer
00-17-F2 (hex) Apple Computer
00-16-CB (hex) Apple Computer

Answer 2

The first 6 bytes of a MAC address represent the OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier). These are administered by the IEEE, so I find it best to always go to the source:

http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml