weezel / macvendor

Determine vendor from the MAC-address of a network device

Introduction

What is MAC-address?

Every network card has a MAC-address which distinctly identifies the device. The address is divided to six octets and usually octet dividers are expressed as colons or dashes. The first three octets identifies the vendor. Vendors are contolled by IEEE standards association.

Purpose of the program

At times there is a need to check the vendor of an associated client in LAN or just to check the vendor in generally.The first implementation of this program was done in Python but I wanted to refresh my memory and decided to port the program to C language also. Program uses CURL library for fetching the newest vendors file. CURL lib was chosen since it's well written, BSD licensed and actively developed.

Dependencies

• libcurl-dev

• (maybe) libbsd-dev

Install

Curl developer libraries are needed and therefore those should be present. In Debian based system, check can be done with the following command:

dpkg -l |grep -i libcurl |grep dev

If if returns nothing, your system likely lacks support. In Ubuntu 11.04 functionality can be achieved this way:

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev

Then follow the steps below.

Get the source code:

git clone [email protected]:weezel/macvendor.git

Go to source code directory:

cd macvendor

Build and compile macvendor and move macvendor binary under $HOME/bin

make

Usage

Search vendor for 00:00:00:00:00:00 MAC-address:

macvendor 00:00:00:00:00:00

Update vendors database:

macvendor -u