Getting MAC Address

Question

I need a cross platform method of determining the MAC address of a computer at run time. For windows the 'wmi' module can be used and the only method under Linux I could find was to run ifconfig and run a regex across its output. I don't like using a package that only works on one OS, and parsing the output of another program doesn't seem very elegant not to mention error prone.

Does anyone know a cross platform method (windows and linux) method to get the MAC address? If not, does anyone know any more elegant methods then those I listed above?

Answer 1

netifaces is a good module to use for getting the mac address (and other addresses). It's crossplatform and makes a bit more sense than using socket or uuid.

>>> import netifaces
>>> netifaces.interfaces()
['lo', 'eth0', 'tun2']

>>> netifaces.ifaddresses('eth0')[netifaces.AF_LINK]
[{'addr': '08:00:27:50:f2:51', 'broadcast': 'ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff'}]

---

• pypi location

• Good Intro to netifaces

Answer 2

One other thing that you should note is that uuid.getnode() can fake the MAC addr by returning a random 48-bit number which may not be what you are expecting. Also, there's no explicit indication that the MAC address has been faked, but you could detect it by calling getnode() twice and seeing if the result varies. If the same value is returned by both calls, you have the MAC address, otherwise you are getting a faked address.

>>> print uuid.getnode.__doc__
Get the hardware address as a 48-bit positive integer.

    The first time this runs, it may launch a separate program, which could
    be quite slow.  If all attempts to obtain the hardware address fail, we
    choose a random 48-bit number with its eighth bit set to 1 as recommended
    in RFC 4122.

Answer 3

Note that you can build your own cross-platform library in python using conditional imports. e.g.

import platform
if platform.system() == 'Linux':
  import LinuxMac
  mac_address = LinuxMac.get_mac_address()
elif platform.system() == 'Windows':
  # etc

This will allow you to use os.system calls or platform-specific libraries.

Answer 4

For Linux let me introduce a shell script that will show the mac address and allows to change it (MAC sniffing).

 ifconfig eth0 | grep HWaddr |cut -dH -f2|cut -d\  -f2
 00:26:6c:df:c3:95

Cut arguements may dffer (I am not an expert) try:

ifconfig etho | grep HWaddr
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:26:6c:df:c3:95  

To change MAC we may do:

ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:80:48:BA:d1:30
ifconfig eth0 up

will change mac address to 00:80:48:BA:d1:30 (temporarily, will restore to actual one upon reboot).

Answer 5

The pure python solution for this problem under Linux to get the MAC for a specific local interface, originally posted as a comment by vishnubob and improved by on Ben Mackey in this activestate recipe

#!/usr/bin/python

import fcntl, socket, struct

def getHwAddr(ifname):
    s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
    info = fcntl.ioctl(s.fileno(), 0x8927,  struct.pack('256s', ifname[:15]))
    return ':'.join(['%02x' % ord(char) for char in info[18:24]])

print getHwAddr('eth0')

Answer 6

The cross-platform getmac package will work for this, if you don't mind taking on a dependency. It works with Python 2.6+ and 3.2+. It will try many different methods until either getting a address or returning None.

from getmac import get_mac_address
eth_mac = get_mac_address(interface="eth0")
win_mac = get_mac_address(interface="Ethernet 3")
ip_mac = get_mac_address(ip="192.168.0.1")
ip6_mac = get_mac_address(ip6="::1")
host_mac = get_mac_address(hostname="localhost")
updated_mac = get_mac_address(ip="10.0.0.1", network_request=True)

Disclaimer: I am the author of the package.