how to get MAC address MAC address on linux

However, unfortunately it is no longer maintained as of May 2021, so it may not be a great choice for new projects. If you only need the addresses of network interfaces, have a limited set of platforms to support, and are able to handle C-extension modules, then you should instead check out the excellent netifaces package by Alastair Houghton ( It's significantly faster (thanks to it being C-code) and has been around a long time and seen widespread usage. It provides one function: get_mac_address()

Remote hosts on the local network (by IPv4/IPv6 address or hostname).

System network interfaces (by interface name).

It provides a platform-independent interface to get the MAC addresses of: MAC addresses can be changed manually with the ifconfig command for tasks such as 'MAC Cloning' that may be required by DSL modems or interface bonding or similar.Pure-Python package to get the MAC address of network interfaces and hosts on the local network. The name will change if the Ethernet card is replaced or the machine is cloned to new hardware. Obviously this only works for machines on the same subnet.

Of course it'll allocate it too as a side effect. With outside help you can do the lookup on the DHCP server this DHCP client for example lets you query any MAC want. NOTE: this works even if they ignore PING packets because they can't ignore the ARP requests that are sent out first. There is even a special command for this arp-scan -localnet which forgets to do the PING. If you try to ping every (local) IP address your arp table arp -a will include all the MAC addresses and their assigned IPs. OTOH, if you really do want the IP address assigned to a particular MAC address the best you're going to do without outside help is to scan the subnet. everything is assigned an IP with dhcp but that IP never changes. That way you have the best of both worlds. The only way I've found to get around this is to make your DHCP server always assign a specific IP address to every device you have. Instead it makes the assumption that are aren't enough IP addresses available and preferentially reuses addresses. But it never uses this information to keep the same devices on stable IP addresses.

This program records the Ethernet address of every device it has ever seen and the IP address that it assigned to it. I think you're running into what I believe is a serious mis-feature of the isc-dhcp server.

How to get MAC address MAC address on linux