The first several digits of a MAC address (Ethernet ID) are specific to its manufacturer/model. I won't ask what's the best way to look these up since it's subjective... but I'd love to know if any here has found a particularly efficient resource to do this.
When online I use MAC_Find: - it's helpful if you're only looking up one or two.
If you're wanting to look up a larger amount or a list of MAC addresses it will be easier to run a script to grab the line (using
grep
or something similar) from IEEE's OUI List. Note that the oui.txt file seperates the MAC address by dashes rather than colons.To make life a bit more fun here's a shell script to get the manufacturer's from whatever
arp
will give you:Example Output:
The first 6 bytes of a MAC address represent the OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier). These are administered by the IEEE, so I find it best to always go to the source:
http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml