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Find MAC address of router?

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schnikies79

Member
Joined
Jul 10, 2004
Is there a way to find the MAC address of a router as would be seen by the WAN port? I can find what the mac address is of the router itself, but not the MAC shown to the outside world. I can't login to the router.

Any ideas?
 
just a question, how is knowing the MAC address going to help you login to the router?

cant you just hard reset the router? then login with the default credentials?

and the MAC address that is on the router, should be the same

if it is wireless, you can use a laptop with netstumbler and see the MAC
 
I don't need to login to the router, I just need the mac. It's installed a friends house that has wireless internet. The tech that installed it has quit and the company at the moment they have no other techs. My friend and I are trying to replace the router (it's a junk trendnet) with a linksys. The secretary at the company was able to give us the PPPOE login information but said we need to make sure the new MAC is the same as the old MAC, so find that out before we change it. She didn't know how to make that available.

The tech put a custom admin/pass on the router which they don't know. They also don't know when they will have a new tech that can come out to houses. It's a crap situation but it's the only broadband ISP available.

The mac address avail to whatever is connecting to it is not the same as what is the WAN sees, since that address can be cloned.
 
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AFAIK you dont have to match MACs when replacing modems/routers... i have never heard of that

i have switched out several routers and modems and never had to match a MAC address...

i dont think she knew what she was talking about. maybe she meant IP address? or subnet?
 
That could be. I doubt she knew what she was talking about, but they could control who connects to their wireless systems via the MAC address.

The wireless antenna goes right into the router. I know that you can't connect a computer directly into the antenna and have it work, I've tried, so the router must be providing some information for the connection.
 
so theoretically, what would happen if the router that was on it died all of a sudden?
they wouldnt be able to do squat because they dont know a mac address? thats bull, just give them the NEW MAC address and tell them that the old router will be shipped straight up to their.....receiving department lol...
 
The company is crap, lol.

I might end up doing that, but I would still like to know if it's possible to find the mac. If I can't, I can't, so whatever.
 
If the connection is PPPoE with the company I work for, then the MAC doesn't mean anything. However, if you do have the company I work for, the only dynamic connection type available in Indiana is DHCP. If that's the case, call the ISP up if the MAC doesn't bind.

What model of modem are you working with? That will most likely let me know which service provider you're working with without saying any names.
 
My router has two MAC addresses printed underneath -- one for the LAN side and the other for the WAN side. The WAN side's MAC address is also reported in its web configuration / status page. The addresses the same except for one digit at the end ('F' on one, and 'E' on the other -- the WAN is less).

If you can't figure out the MAC as simply, then if you could temporarily re-configure it -- set it up for DHCP, and connect it to another network as a client (WAN on router -> LAN on new network), you could get its MAC address off the new network router's information or by pinging it and checking arp.
 
It's not my wireless provider, it's a friends. Cell1net.net in east central IL. I live in southern indiana and can't get broadband (at home anyway). :(

After talking to some other people, the mac doesn't matter. Just take the new router, input the PPPOE info and plug it in. I'm going to work on it tomorrow because I did just that and it wouldn't work (the login is supposed to be email address/password), so I dunno at the moment. I tried sharing the internet on my notebook over the ethernet port so it would handle DHCP and plugged it into the wan port, but I never could find out what the ip address of the router was already set to since it wasn't in the range of ICS (>192.168.0.1), or it wasn't accepting IP address w/o logging into the PPPOE. Oh well.

The router being used at the moment belongs to the provider, it's a Trendnet TEW-432BRP which is absolute junk. It's chokes all the time and has to be reset. We're replacing it with a WRT54GL. It only the mac address for the AP on the bottom, not for the WAN.
 
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