Ping a mac address

Posted date:2020-03-09

Those familiar with the *nix world know of the application arping….however….you may not be familiar with the fact that there are 2 different versions of this program.

One version will essentially return the mac address of the IP address you tell it. To me, there are so many other ways to get this information it makes that a less than ideal tool…..you can look at your arp table, can do nmap scan, packet captuer, lots of tools to do this.

The other version, and the one I prefer, will actually ping the mac address. If I am on the same broadcast domain and just want to ping the mac address to make sure it is also on the same broadcast domain, or if there is an issue with dhcp or config. For some reason I run into this need a lot….anyway, I use this arping by ThomasHabets: https://github.com/ThomasHabets/arping