
Instructions to properly identify the MAC address for each corresponding Operating System is listed below: Letters must also be capitalized on the form. Please always include the colons ( :'s) between the numbers. On Windows it will sometimes be represented with dashes between the numbers. The physical (MAC) address is an 8 byte number such as 08:00:20:9A:38:34. For that reason, the MAC address of a machine is required so that it can be properly configured for the engineering network. The MAC address is used to assign the TCP/IP address by means of DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protcol). This is the actual hardware address that the lowest level of the network uses to communicate. We covered this command when finding your external IP address in the past.Every network interface has a MAC address (Media Access Controller) also known as the physical address. This will instantly report back your external IP address. This is easiest to find through a Terminal command a well: You can find your external IP address easily by going to a website like Google and typing “what is my IP address” or by going to websites like “” and checking there. Your external IP address is what is broadcast to the world rather than your local network (behind a wireless router, for instance). Find your External Public IP Address in Mac OS X However, using ipconfig you can also set your IP address from the command line. I have heard ipconfig is not supported in all versions of Mac OS X so I did not recommend this as the first choice. You can change this to en0 for wired/ethernet too. The other command line option is to use: ipconfig getifaddr en1 which reports back only your en1 (usually wireless) IP address. Because you can always ignore 127.0.0.1, this guarantees that your IP address will be the other IP between ‘inet’ and ‘netmask’ Your IP address is usually next to the last entry of ‘inet’ and in this case is 192.168.0.100, an IP address is always in the format of x.x.x.x but it will never be 127.0.0.1 because that is your machines loopback address.Inet6 fe80::fa1e:dfff:feea:d544%en1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5

Inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 You will see something that looks like this:.Launch the Terminal located in /Applications/Utilities/.This is how to find the IP address of your Mac through the Terminal, this is often the quickest way for those that are more technically inclined. Now we’ll cover the more technical approaches to getting your IP address using the Mac OS X command line: Find your IP Address via the Mac OS X Terminal Your IP address is the number listed, in the above case it is 192.168.0.100 Your IP address will be visible to the right, as indicated in the screenshot below.From the Apple menu pull down “System Preferences”.You can find any Macs IP, or your IP address from the Mac System Preferences Network configuration screen:
