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MAC Addresses

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8 views3 pages

MAC Addresses

Uploaded by

Arixson
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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MAC Address

Repeater - It takes the signal that comes in from one of the ports and then it
recreates multiple copies of that and sends it out onall of the other connected
cables.

So, it literally takes one signal and repeats it out to as many connections as you
have.
Now that creates a big problem.

The challenge we have here is that I've got a network. All right so this is going
to be for computers that are connected to a single hub.

All right so this is going to be for computers that are connected to a single hub.

The challenge that we have is that let's say that this purple computer wants to
talk to the green computer.

What's going to be taking place is that when this purple computer sends out a frame
it gets sent into the hub and the hub remember repeats it out to all of the
connections so everybody gets an example of that frame.

Now that frame isn't for everybody it's just for the green computer.

So we need some way to address each of the frames so that even though everybody
gets it only the green computer is actually going to read the frame and use it.

These other two guys when that frame comes in they're going to see that it's not
for them and then they'll just wipe it out or consume it so it never goes past the
network card.

So in order to do that I want to make an analogy of a network card as a tray.

So this for me, I'm have a little fun here, is a network card. This ugly old vacuum
tube from my shop vac

RJ45 a wired connection into the Ethernet port

So when a frame comes in it literally plops down and the network card looks at it.

Now the problem is there's nothing that identifies it and says it's for this
network card for this particular machine.

And that's where something called a MAC address comes into play. In order to
appreciate a MAC address we're going to have to take a look at a computer.

So what I'm going to do is fire up my windows computer and let's take a direct
close personal look at a MAC address.

So here I am in Windows 10 and when I'm going to do is I'm going to fire up


PowerShell.
Now a lot of people are like 'oh PowerShell why can't we just use a command
prompt?"

So I'm first want to teach you an incredibly important command that you're going to
use like crazy and it's called ipconfig.

So i p c o n f i g.

Now if I type it by itself we're going to get some kind of information but I want
you to type it a special way. What you're going to do is type ipconfig slash all
just like that.

Now when we type that we can see all the information there is about all of our
different network cards.

Now this is the card I'm interested in because this is the one I'm actually
connecting to the network on. it's just a regular Ethernet NIC.

And what I want you to look at is right here. You see this? So we have 12 numbers
here broken up into pairs.

So there are six pairs.

This is our MAC address.

So this is the unique identifier for the network card.

Now as we take a look at this, first of all this is a 48 bit address,

we know that these are hexadecimal values and there's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12.


Each hexadecimal character represents four binary characters.

So four times 12 is 48.

Now if we take a look at these first half. These first three pairs these are known
as the OEM numbers.

Intel, the maker of these network cards, is issued this value from the Internet
folks.

So these numbers right here are issued to Intel.

So every Intel NIC, well actually Intel make so many they have a number of these,
is, use that unique OEM identifiers we call it. The last six values are burned in
to each card at the factory and each card gets a different value.

So we have the OEM, whoops, the OEM and then what we call the unique ID.

So the thing we need to remember is that every network card in existence has a
unique MAC address.

It has to have that because we never know on our network here whose network cards
are going to be plugged in.

And it's the MAC addresses that we apply to the frame to make sure it gets
delivered to the right place.

So each one of these computers has a unique MAC address.

So what we'll do, let's take a look at our frame again, is we're going to add to
the frame MAC addresses.

Now I've got two blocks here and that's because we have the MAC address where it's
going to and the MAC address of where it's coming from.

So whenever your network card sends out a chunk of data it's very important to the
network card that not only does know where to send it to but it also will put its
own MAC address in there so the receiving computer can send it back.
Now the other thing that will come into play here is a CRC or a cyclic redundancy
check.

This is just used as a way to verify that the data is good. If it's bad data then
it knows to resend it.

So what we'll do, let me go and get it pointed in the right direction, is once this
is all created it gets sent out.

I'm not going to push it through too far because I'll never get it back! But push,
off it goes off to the network.

Now the cool part to all this is that as it leaves this computer and comes into the
hub, remember that the hub creates as many copies as necessary to represent all the
different computers it's connected to.

So it makes, in this case, one to three new copies and it sends them down the line
to all the individual computers, and as these frames come into the computer, it
drops down on the tray, and the cool part is is that every network card knows what
its MAC address is.

So the card looks at this.

If it's a MAC address for him then it's going to strip away all this extra
information and send it up into the software of the system.

However if it's a MAC address that's not for him he'll look at it see it's not his
MAC address and he just makes it disappear and doesn't do anything with it.

And that is how MAC addresses work.

My MAC Address 90-2B-34 OEM/DF-EE-17 Unique ID

A MAC Address is a Unique 48-bit indentifer for a NIC

Frames have a source and destination MAC Address

NICs use MAC Addresses to decide whether or not to process a frame

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