The flags here are the same flags reported by ifconfig, although by contrast to ifconfig, ip link show seems to report the state of the device flags accurately. If you are familiar with ifconfig output, you should notice that these two lines are a terse summary of lines 1 and 3 of each ifconfig device entry. It is far better (and more intuitive) to refer to the interfaces by name.įor each device, two lines will summarize the link state and characteristics. These numbers are dynamically calcualted, so should not be used to refer to the interfaces. The ip utility will sequentially number the network cards in the output.

We will use the iproute2 package, which we have already discussed in previous articlesġ: lo: mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN First task: find the MAC address of your network devices. We will just show you how to change your MAC on a Linux computer. Spoofing your MAC address to gain unauthorized access to a network is beyond the scope of this article. If you change your MAC address and you connect to a public network your actual MAC address will never be stored.Ī couple of bad reasons would be to extend your length of time on a specific public wireless network or to “spoof” a MAC address and gain access to a wireless or wired network that is using MAC address filtering. A good reason someone might change their MAC address would be for security reasons. There are many reasons one person would want to change their MAC address and it could be for good reasons or for bad reasons.

It may also be known as an Ethernet hardware address (EHA), hardware address, adapter address, or physical address. If assigned by the manufacturer, a MAC address usually encodes the manufacturer’s registered identification number. MAC addresses are most often assigned by the manufacturer of a network interface card (NIC) and are stored in its hardware, the card’s read-only memory, or some other firmware mechanism. Logically, MAC addresses are used in the Media Access Control protocol sub-layer of the OSI reference model. A Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to network interfaces for communications on the physical network segment.

Get mac address from ip linux