Different MAC addresses for same LAN card

bhupeshchawda · 03-26-2007, 11:07 AM

Hi friends...I tried to get the MAC address of my only ethernet card eth0 (configured as DHCP). I got different results with the two commands arp and ifconfig.Can anybody explain me the reason and what is my real MAC address??

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# arp -an
? (192.168.1.1) at 00:17:7C:01:E5:75 [ether] on eth0
[root@localhost ~]#

[root@localhost ~]# ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:19:5B:6B:F2:55
          inet addr:192.168.1.2  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::219:5bff:fe6b:f255/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:3049 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2559 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:1638976 (1.5 MiB)  TX bytes:382240 (373.2 KiB)
          Interrupt:9 Base address:0x6c00
[root@localhost ~]#

Thanx in advance
--Bhupesh

anomie · 03-26-2007, 11:32 AM

I don't see the problem. arp appears to have reported your gateway (?) MAC address. ifconfig reported your NIC's MAC address.

bhupeshchawda · 03-26-2007, 11:42 AM

Ya thanx...I didn't know thar arp gives the gateway MAC address...Sorry for the silly question...

urka58 · 03-26-2007, 04:50 PM

Not exactly..
arp gives you, unless specified by -a hostname, the MAC address of all machines connected to your net, not only the gateway.
Ciao