MAC Addresses

battikh

hellooow, have a quick question about mac addresses.
the standard says that the 1st 3 octets identify the manufacturer of the card. but how the manufacturer handles and classifies his 3 octets are not specified in any standard. so i would like to know if they all follow some kind of rule. To clarify the thing, i'll just give an example. Cisco classifies its mac addresses in different range, and they assign a specific range only for ip phones, another one only for access points, another one only for fiber cards, ... so basically, just by looking at the mac address you can identify the type of device that generated this packet.
so do other vendors do the same thing? has HP a specific range used only for printers? does linksys have a range for printing servers, another for wireless routers, another for voip devices, ...
basically, all i want to know is if i can define the type of device (printer, ip phone, access point, ...) just by looking at the (supposedly not spoofed) mac address...

taaaaaaaaaaaaaanks

BashLogic

yo,

answer to your question, yes, as for details well you will have to call vendor support ;)
its not that publisized, dunno why usually all that i have heard regarding the subject have come thru word of month or perseption. for example with hbas,
qlogic starts with 21:00:00
then again when its oem for hp, hence totally identical accept for the brand label, it would be something like 51:00:00 etc...

and yes, i have had the honnor of stumbling upon two separate cards with identical address! go figure!
just as exotic as having 10/11 scsi disks broken out of the box!!!

battikh

thaaaaanx :D
i guess i'll have to go do some research to get the ranges...

proners

well lol there is a way to relate(link) the MAC address to a specific product and even more than that.. but i won't tell the 'tricks of the trade' in public lol :p, send me a pm with "/pretty please' in it and i'll tell you how :D

samer

proners wrotewell lol there is a way to relate(link) the MAC address to a specific product and even more than that.. but i won't tell the 'tricks of the trade' in public lol :p, send me a pm with "/pretty please' in it and i'll tell you how :D

I'm sure that information is shared freely on the web. Why don't you be open to the community? :)

proners

samer wrote
proners wrotewell lol there is a way to relate(link) the MAC address to a specific product and even more than that.. but i won't tell the 'tricks of the trade' in public lol :p, send me a pm with "/pretty please' in it and i'll tell you how :D
I'm sure that information is shared freely on the web. Why don't you be open to the community? :)

well you're right :)
http://www.technitium.com/
Nice freeware program with many uses :D

so @watermelon, using technitium will allow you to identify the manufacturer and each has specific ranges but i am sure that u can't memorize all of them(not at all lol) if any :p ...

edit: i said it's open-source when in fact it's only freeware