What is Mac address?
A Media Access Control (MAC) address is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for use as a network address in communications on a physical network segment. It is a 48-bit (or 64-bit) binary address that is typically represented in hexadecimal notation and is used to uniquely identify a device on a network
- A Media Access Control (MAC) address is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for use as a network address in communications on a physical network segment.
- A MAC address is a 48-bit (or sometimes 64-bit) binary address that is typically represented in hexadecimal notation as six groups of two digits separated by colons or hyphens.
- MAC addresses are assigned by hardware manufacturers and are typically hard-coded into the device’s firmware, although they can sometimes be spoofed or changed through software.
Python mac address library and its usage
The Python “mac address” library is a third-party module that provides functions for working with Media Access Control (MAC) addresses in Python programs. It can be used to parse, validate, manipulate, and convert MAC addresses between different formats, such as colon-separated or hyphen-separated hexadecimal. It can also be used to generate random MAC addresses or retrieve the MAC address of a network interface on the local system
The library is useful in network programming and in applications that deal with hardware addresses, such as in identifying network devices or enforcing network security policies.
Installing Python mac address
Now let’s look at how we can install Python mac address to our system. To do this you can install it by pip command
pip install macaddress
Once you successfully installed it next we can import the Mac address using the below command
import macaddress
Once you have imported the macaddress library, you can use its functions to convert MAC addresses.
Converting MAC addresses to different formats:
To convert a MAC address to a different format, you can use the to_eui48() function. For example, to convert a MAC address in the colon-separated format (e.g., “00:11:22:33:44:55”) to the hyphen-separated format (e.g., “00-11-22-33-44-55”)
You can do this by doing the following command
mac_address = "00:11:22:33:44:55"
hyphenated_mac_address = macaddress.to_eui48(mac_address, separator="-")
print(hyphenated_mac_address) # prints "00-11-22-33-44-55"
You can also use the to_unix() function to convert a MAC address to its 48-bit integer representation (in Unix byte order).
For example:
mac_address = "00:11:22:33:44:55"
unix_byte_order = macaddress.to_unix(mac_address)
print(unix_byte_order) # prints 115598800118933
Converting MAC addresses to OUIs:
The macaddress the library also provides functions for converting MAC addresses to their corresponding OUIs (Organizationally Unique Identifiers). The OUI is the first three bytes of a MAC address and identifies the manufacturer of the network adapter.
To convert a MAC address to its OUI, you can use the to_OUI() function. You can do this by the following command
mac_address = "00:11:22:33:44:55"
oui = macaddress.to_OUI(mac_address)
print(oui) # prints "001122"
You can also use the to_manuf() function to look up the manufacturer of a MAC address. This function uses a local copy of the IEEE OUI database to look up the manufacturer’s name.
For example, you can check the following code:
mac_address = "00:11:22:33:44:55"
manufacturer = macaddress.to_manuf(mac_address)
print(manufacturer) # prints "Dell Inc."
- Create a telegram bot step by step using python - June 2, 2023
- Easy way to create a database in MySQL - April 27, 2023
- 5 Unique Hackathon Project Ideas: Creative and Innovative - March 27, 2023
