What is Mac Address? Explained in Bangla | Mac Addressing

Mac Address Explained by Bandhu Tuhin

Media Access Control (MAC) Address –
MAC Addresses are unique 48-bits hardware number of a computer, which is embedded into network card (known as Network Interface Card) during the time of manufacturing. MAC Address is also known as Physical Address of a network device. In IEEE 802 standard, Data Link Layer is divided into two sublayers –

Logical Link Control(LLC) Sublayer
Media Access Control(MAC) Sublayer
MAC address is used by Media Access Control (MAC) sublayer of Data-Link Layer. MAC Address is word wide unique, since millions of network devices exists and we need to uniquely identify each.

ormat of MAC Address –
MAC Address is a 12-digit hexadecimal number (6-Byte binary number), which is mostly represented by Colon-Hexadecimal notation. First 6-digits (say 00:40:96) of MAC Address identifies the manufacturer, called as OUI (Organizational Unique Identifier). IEEE Registration Authority Committee assign these MAC prefixes to its registered vendors.

Here are some OUI of well known manufacturers :

CC:46:D6 – Cisco
3C:5A:B4 – Google, Inc.
3C:D9:2B – Hewlett Packard
00:9A:CD – HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO.,LTD
The rightmost six digits represents Network Interface Controller, which is assigned by manufacturer.

As discussed above, MAC address is represented by Colon-Hexadecimal notation. But this is just a conversion, not mandatory. MAC address can be represented using any of the following formats –

Note: Colon-Hexadecimal notation is used by Linux OS and Period-separated Hexadecimal notation is used by Cisco Systems.

How to find MAC address –
Command for UNIX/Linux – ifconfig -a
ip link list
ip address show

Command forWindows OS – ipconfig /all

MacOS – TCP/IP Control Panel

Note – LAN technologies like Token Ring, Ethernet use MAC Address as their Physical address but there are some networks (AppleTalk) which does not use MAC address.

Types of MAC Address –
Unicast – A Unicast addressed frame is only sent out to the interface leading to specific NIC. If the LSB (least significant bit) of first octet of an address is set to zero, the frame is meant to reach only one receiving NIC. MAC Address of source machine is always Unicast.

Multicast – Multicast address allow the source to send a frame to group of devices. In Layer-2 (Ethernet) Multicast address, LSB (least significant bit) of first octet of an address is set to one. IEEE has allocated the address block 01-80-C2-xx-xx-xx (01-80-C2-00-00-00 to 01-80-C2-FF-FF-FF) for group addresses for use by standard protocols.

References –
MAC address – Wikipedia
RFC 7042 tools.

source

mac address