Why do you need a Mac address?

Answer 1

this discussion arose because you guys are not used to the layered protocol model. IP and MAC belong to different layers, IP is a network global address, MAC is a data link localaddress. Besides they refer to completely different objects. If you don't understand this point you'd better go back to the layer model and study it.

Answer 2

To find the MAC Address for you Network Interface Card (NIC) you need to follow the following steps:

1. Open you command prompt.

2. Browse to your root drive and type ipconfig/all and press enter

3. This command prompt command will display the MAC address of your PC' MAC address.

Note: The above steps work only for Windows enabled PC. As i have tested this in Windows based PC only.

Answer 3

MAC addresses were designed to be a "physical" identifier for a piece of hardware, and came before IP addresses. By observing a MAC address, you can identify the manufacturer of the device, as well as the approximate date of manufacture (if the company kept records, they could tell you down to the minute!). MAC addresses are used by older non-routable protocols such as IPX/SPX. The main drawback of MAC addresses is that you could not arrange them "logically", thus routing tables would have been impossible to implement; a set of 65536 computers on a network would have required around 1MB of RAM, and the maximum capacity of 281 trillion devices would far outstrip any single router's memory capacity.

IP addresses, on the other hand, are "logical" identifiers for a piece of software to use to identify the destination of a packet of data. Routers do not route to single devices, but to entire logical networks. This means that routers only need a small number of routing entries to service literally millions of computers. IP addresses are assigned by country or region, and then to various carriers within the region, and so on until they are finally divided up at the premise level, at which point some type of Network Address Translation (NAT) occurs, and ultimately the IP address is resolved to a MAC. Continuing from the above example, those 65536 computers can be serviced by a single network ID, which requires somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-16 bytes of data instead of 1MB.

The only devices that need to concern themselves with MAC addresses, then, become switches. Most switches handle no more than 256 devices at once, so they still only require a small amount of power and memory.

Answer 4

A MAC address identifies an actual piece of hardware, while IP addresses are read by and used by software.