Remote MAC address on Windows

[Luis]

Run ifconfig on the server, plop the output into a text file on a shared 
folder, examine said shared file. Or, if possible, email the text file 
and then parse.

If you have permission to run a remote shell, then you can run that in 
directly from the remote end.

ARP info from: 
http://www.erg.abdn.ac.uk/users/gorry/course/inet-pages/arp.html

'The figure below shows the use of arp when a computer tries to contact 
a remote computer on the same LAN (known as "sysa") using the "ping" 
program. It is assumed that no previous IP datagrams have been received 
form this computer, and therefore arp must first be used to identify the 
MAC address of the remote computer.'

So the 'ping, wait and arp -a' should work, you might want to pipe the 
output to a file.

Other than that you could have a look at packet sniffers and check out 
the client server negotiations. http://www.wireshark.org

Cheers,

Luis.



J. Landman Gay wrote:
> Alex Tweedly wrote:
>> allow a few seconds after the ping before trying it (should update 
>> within one second unless there are some funny config changes on the 
>> machine).
>>
>> remember that it will not work on wifi networks, and will only work on 
>> a simple LAN (i.e. no router between client and server)
>>
>> remember it will not work properly in some (unusual) setups where all 
>> traffic is directed through a router/DHCP server - usually 
>> identifiable by multiple arp entries with the same MAC address for 
>> multiple IP addresses (this is pretty obscure, but just possible)
> 
> That's bad news. It has to work on any network configuration.
>>
>> and finally - because I just can't resist - why do you want to do this ?
>>
>> answer off-list if you prefer - but I can think of a lot of reasons 
>> why you should try to avoid knowing the MAC address of other machines 
>> .... it can get you into deep trouble in some cases (e.g. proxy-ARP 
>> based networks, or those where gratuitous ARPs are used to switch the 
>> Mac address association, but there is no way to get these changes 
>> triggered up to any application which has stored this info).
> 
> Then that's a problem too. My app creates a serial key that is 
> registered to a specific machine. It won't run unless the MAC address 
> the app is on matches the one that was stored on installation. This has 
> worked fine for a couple of years, but now we have a situation where 
> people on a network want to lanuch the app from the server. When that 
> happens, the app (as it is now, using ipconfig) gets the MAC address of 
> the local machine, which of course won't match, and the app refuses to 
> run. So I need to retrieve the MAC address of the server the app is 
> actually installed on, not the one on the local machine.
> 
> If there is no reliable way to get the server's MAC address, I have a 
> problem.
> 
>