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How to locate your MAC/Physical Address

A MAC address is a unique identifier for each network device within your computer (network card, wireless network card, modem, etc). In order to use your computer on the RIT network your computer needs to be registered and is identified based on your MAC address. Obtaining your MAC address varies depending on the type of computer and operating system you have.

Windows Vista / XP / 2000

1. On XP and 2000 click the Start button and select Run (shown in the screenshot below). In the Run box type cmd and hit Enter, a black command window will appear (shown in the screenshot below).
2. On Vista type cmd in the Start Search box and hit enter.
3. For all Windows: in the command window type ipconfig /all This will list detail information about your network card and network connection. The MAC address is labeled as a Physical Address and is circled in the screenshot below.

Mac OS X

1. Select the Apple menu and open System Preferences
2. Within the System Preferences window select the Network option
3. In the Network window select Built-In Ethernet (or if you are trying to register your wireless card select Airport). The screen will vary slightly depending on which version of Mac OS X you have (the screenshot below is from Tiger) however the MAC address will always be referred to as Ethernet ID (Airport ID in the case of an Airport card). The MAC address, labeled by Apple as Hardware ID is circled in the screenshot below.

Linux
While Resnet does not officially support Linux, students are free to run it on the RIT network.

1. From either a terminal window or a text-based session, you need to execute the ifconfig command. In most versions of the operating system only root, or a privileged user can do this. If the account you are using does have privileged access via the sudo command, you can simply type sudo ifconfig -a as shown in the screenshot below. If you do not have sudo access you will need to login as root and issue the ifconfig -a command. The output is the same and the MAC addressed is prefaced with HWaddr. The screenshot below details the output and what you are looking for.