How to find MAC addresses on network?

[Brian McKee]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Chris G <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
> Is there a (reasonably) straightforward way of finding the MAC
> addresses of systems (well, strictly, interfaces) on a network?
>
> arping works for some but not all of my hardware, presumably some
> things (like my HP printer) don't respond to arping.  What can I use
> to find the MAC address of the printer?

You could try pinging 255.255.255.255 and seeing if it shows up in the
arp tables.

Some printer manufacturers (like HP) have SNMP based programs that
broadcast some magic packet that makes the printer say 'hello' on the
same subnet.

I had a bunch of Samsung printers that were configured for manual IP
that I used to loop thru all the /24 subnets under 192.168 and ping
until they responded - until I found the MarkNet program that somehow
got it to change to your subnet 'automatically' via SNMP - I always
meant to do that with wireshark running to see how it did it, but
never got around to it.

You can often find the MAC address on the card somewhere too :-)

Brian