MAC address of a client machine

[Himanshu Mehta]

By using " # arp hostname " command i am able to find the ip and mac address of a client machine on local lan. I am unable to find the mac address of a client situated across the Router. Though iam able to ping the very same client sucessfully. Kindly suggest me the way out.

My e-mail address is
himanshu_mehta@fineorganics.com

Thanks in advance.
Himanshu

[Bruno Vidal]

Hi,
It is totaly normal, the mac address is used on the local lan, not across router, so you can have only local mac address, not mac from the system far away, the router avoid this. I think there is no simple solution to retrieve it, because even in the TCP packet you will have only the mac from the router, not from the original system.

[V. V. Ravi Kumar_1]

hi,
Across routers ARP can not resolve MAC addresses.

Regards

[Himanshu Mehta]

Hi!

Thanks for the prompt reply.

I know that arp can not go across the router and get the MAC address. So I am looking for the any other utility
( on HP-UX )which can help me.

Thanks

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

check to see if it's in your arp cache:

arp -a

Later,
Bill

[Jarle Bjorgeengen]

Hi,

why would you want that ? You can't reach the client by using the mac address only, from the other side of a router anyway.

The only thing I can think of how to do it, would be to run lanscan on the client, from a remote machine.

If you do it for administratonal purposes, (inventory reporting?) maybe you should consider hp Service Control Manager. You run the same hp-ux commands on a range of hosts, and gather the output.

Otherwise
ssh or rexec(insecure)

Rgds Jarle

[Massimo Bianchi]

Following this last hint,
you can:

- go into the router and issue the "arp -a" from there

or

- write a little shell script that goes on any host, output an "arp -a" and give you the results.

Massimo