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How to find your computer's MAC Address
How to find your computer's MAC Address
Every computer with the ability to connect to the network has one or more MAC (media access control) addresses. The MAC address is used as a unique identifier. Commonly, this is used to allow an IT Pro to reserve an IP address for your computer. However your MAC is considered private within your local network, and is not passed across network boundaries.
Below are instructions for finding the active MAC address of your computer, for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Here is a link to some alternate instructions for several operating systems.
If you are on a wired University network, and your network connection is already working properly, you may be able to use our My MAC Address tool to automatically find your MAC address (based on your current IP address, from university network logs).
1) Open a command prompt
- a) click the Start button
- b) type: cmd
- c) hit Enter
2) In the command prompt, type: ipconfig -all
- a) find the section containing the words "Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection"
- b) your Ethernet MAC will be listed as "Physical Address"
- c) it is denoted by orange arrows in the example below
1) Open the Network Utility:
- a) click the Spotlight tool, in the top right corner of the screen, near the clock
- b) type: network utility
- c) hit Enter
2) In the Network Utility Window:
- a) from the drop-down menu, select the option containing the word "Ethernet"
- b) your Ethernet MAC will be listed as "Hardware Address"
- c) it is denoted by orange arrows in the example below
Please Note: Macs without ethernet ports (any laptop with a Retina display, or without a CD drive), will need to get an ethernet adapter first and plug it in before registering for wired network access. This is because the hardware (MAC) address is actually tied to the adapter, so you will only be able to view your ethernet hardware address with the adapter plugged in.
- Open the Terminal
- click the search button, or hit the Windows key
- type: terminal
- hit Enter
- In the terminal, type
ip aand press Enter- Each block of output corresponds to a different port/interface on your device
- Ethernet: find any entries that begin with "eth" or "en" (highlighted green)
- WiFi: find any entries that begin with "wl"
- The MAC address will appear right after "link/ether" (highlighted blue)
Here, the enp0s31f6 interface has MAC D4:A2:CD:EC:99:F6 and is DOWN (not plugged in).
The eth0 interface has MAC D4:A2:CD:EC:99:F7 and is UP (plugged in). The orange arrows point to its MAC address.
Short URL for this page: http://go.illinois.edu/getmac