Determining Ethernet HW Address

Jim Nicholson jimn at minusen.force9.co.uk
Mon Mar 27 14:10:34 EST 2000


Jerome Chan wrote:
> Is there a portable way of determining the Ethernet HW Address?

I don't know the answer to this, but which Ethernet Interface were you
thinking of - remember a machine can have multiple ethernet cards, PPP
dialup connections etc.  So if you were going to look for the MAC address
for _an_ ethernet interface, you would need to specify _which_ ethernet
interface you wanted, and AFAIK there is no standard way of referring to
them.

Linux calls them
eth0, eth1, eth2 etc. for ethernet cards
ppp0, ppp1 etc for dial-up connections over a modem

IIRC Solaris calls ethernet cards le0, le1 etc. (thats "ell ee zero" etc.)

goodness knows how WinDoze refers to them.

Jim



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