{"id":1054,"date":"2021-09-23T10:21:35","date_gmt":"2021-09-23T10:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/?page_id=1054"},"modified":"2021-10-05T16:59:19","modified_gmt":"2021-10-05T16:59:19","slug":"troubleshooting-qa-january-11-2005","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/troubleshooting-qa-january-11-2005\/","title":{"rendered":"Troubleshooting Q&A – January 11, 2005"},"content":{"rendered":"

What’s a MAC Address and How Do You Find It<\/span><\/h3>\n

To ensure optimal wireless network security, a little MAC (Media Access Control) filtering couldn’t hurt. Learn what a MAC address is and how to find your’s … plus, why some online games may be dropping you.<\/b><\/p>\n

By Ron Pacchiano<\/b><\/p>\n

Q.<\/span><\/i><\/b>\u00a0Not to long ago a good friend of mine became a victim of identity theft. Trying to repair all of the damage that was done to her credit was frustrating and took what seemed like forever to resolve. Since then I have become very protective of my personal information. I bought a shredder and try not to use my credit cards online unless I really need to. This anxiety about identity theft has kept me away from purchasing a wireless router.<\/p>\n

A while back I saw an article that you did that described how to properly set up a secure wireless network. So based on the advice in your article, I replaced my aging router with a new wireless one. I implemented all of the things you suggested. I’m using WEP with 256-bit encryption and I’m not broadcasting my\u00a0SSID<\/a>. One of my router’s other features that I want to enable is something called MAC address filtering. According to the documentation, this would restrict access to the network to only the PCs that have been registered with the router. So even if someone managed to get my WEP key, they still wouldn’t be able to connect to my network.<\/p>\n

My problem is that before this, I had never heard of a MAC address or know where to find it. I know what my IP address is and tried that but it didn’t work. Could tell me exactly what a MAC address is and how I go about finding it? Thanks.<\/p>\n

A.<\/span><\/i><\/b>\u00a0Sorry to hear about your friend’s identity theft issues and I understand your concerns with wanting to be as secure as possible. Just remember restricting access to your wireless network isn’t enough. Make sure you have a good anti-virus package with constantly updated virus definitions installed and running on your PCs at all times. Also, you should always be performing Windows Critical updates as well as using adware removal tools (like SpyBot Search and Destroy or Ad-Aware) periodically to eliminate any possible threats to your system.<\/p>\n

While your wireless network is already pretty secure, it doesn’t hurt to enable MAC filtering as well. So to answer your question, MAC is an acronym and stands for Media Access Control. The MAC address (also known as the physical address) is your computer’s unique hardware number. When you’re connected to the Internet from your computer (or host as the Internet protocol thinks of it), a correspondence table relates your IP address to your computer’s physical (MAC) address on the LAN. This is how the router knows where to send IP packets destined for your system.<\/p>\n

Identifying your MAC address is easy. In most cases, it is physically printed on the adapter itself. On a laptop with a PC Card based adapter this is easy to see. Just disconnect the card and flip it over. On a PC or a laptop with an integrated network adapter you need to find it using software. The process is almost identical to the utility you use to see your systems IP address. On a Windows 2000 or Windows XP machine that would be IPCONFIG. To see the MAC address you need to add the switch \/ALL to the command. For those not familiar with it the sequence of steps is as follows:<\/p>\n