How to determine the MAC address of a remote machine
August 5, 2008 2 Comments
Sometimes it’s necessary to discover the MAC address of a remote system on a network quickly (for example when setting up DHCP scope reservations). It’s fortunately a really easy process to determine this information.
First of all, ping the remote host, then run an
arp -a
at the command line. This will give you the MAC details. The catch is that this only works on the same subnet – when trying to do this on a remote subnet (on the other side of a router, etc) you won’t get a response…there is a solution for this though, as long as the remote host you want to determine the MAC for is a Windows host.
NBTscan is a tool that can do this (and is available from the repositories on most linux distros (or at least on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, and is also downloadable for Windows 
)
There is also this arping command that will help you get the MAC address of a remote machine and it works like a regular ping.
#arping -I ipaddress
will return
ARPING dst_ipaddress from src_ipaddress ethn
Unicast reply from dst_ipaddress [ 00:00:00:00:00:00 ] 0.000ms
“arping” works great … as long as I’m on the same subnet. It’s got the same subnet limitation as per above. Good try, though.
“nbtstat -A ” is a native tool for Windows. Supposedly Bonjour can do this (“dns-sd -B _ipp._tcp” — maybe.)