If you are on his list, you are in if not, you stay out! They are an effective form of access control, which is basically like the work of a bouncer in front of a nightclub. Thus, a MAC address gives the network admins a reliable address to keep track of known devices within the system. In contrast, IP addresses of network devices are constantly changing unless they are set as “static” by the system administrator. It is a permanent address for a device in a network that doesn’t change under normal circumstances, ever.

At the bottom of “Properties,” you can find the “Physical Address (MAC).” How MAC filtering is usefulĪ MAC address is like a government ID or Social Security number given to citizens. Go to Network & Internet and click the name of any active connection. If you want a strict GUI-based method, head to the Settings menu. In the list that follows, you can find the MAC address of individual cards by looking at the entry beside “Physical Address.” It will be a 12-digit hexadecimal number. Type the command “ ipconfig/all ” and execute it by pressing Enter. Initiate an instance by clicking on the Start button and typing “CMD.” Run it and a command prompt window will appear. The quickest way to look at MAC addresses on a Windows PC is by using the command prompt. You can identify a MAC address by its format - a series of 12 hexadecimal digits arranged as “00-00-00-00-00-00-00.” Finding the MAC addresses on a Windows 10 PC If you use virtualization software, there can be even more! Since MAC addresses are tied to network cards and not their PCs, it is quite common to see one PC host multiple MAC addresses. If your PC has both Ethernet and Wi-Fi capabilities, that means that it has two separate adapters - one wired and the other wireless. This entire process is called MAC filtering. Any PC whose MAC address is on a whitelist is allowed access to the network ports, while those on blacklists are denied access or blocked.

If you want to manage access rights to a network, it can be done easily using these MAC addresses. A Media Access Control (MAC) address is a unique identifier assigned to each network card - and by extension, the PC to which it belongs - in a computer network. All computers use a piece of hardware called a network interface controller (also called a network card) to connect to all networks, local and wide.

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