How to find out a local and remote MAC address

This post is going to cover how to find out your local MAC address on your PC as well as any machine that you can talk to.

Let’s cover the easy item “how to find a local MAC address”. This can be easily done by opening the command prompt by going to START – RUN – cmd

This will open a command prompt. Type the command:

ipconfig /all

This will show you your mac address as seen in the screenshot.

Now how do you find out the remote MAC address of a client?

Using the same command prompt window type:

ping %hostname%

*Note* please replace %hostname% with an actual PC on your network.

You should get some replies like such:

Now that your machine has “talked” to the other machine. Your computer should have cached the MAC address in the arp cache. To view your arp cache type this command in the command prompt:

arp –a

You will get the listing of all the IP addresses that you talked to recently. Just look for the IP address of the machine you just pinged.