What is NIC and MAC address
Hi all and welcome to this post of my blog. Today we want to see what the NIC is and how NIC relate to MAC address. Let’s get into it.
What is NIC?
First layer of OSI seven layer model is the Physical layer and you should know what is it. If you don’t know anything about OSI model this page will help you. Also you can take a look at this picture:
So as you can see the layer one named Physical. at this layer we have cables as the most important part. But how can we network some devices with cables? For example how can we network two computers in a company?
In here the NIC will help us. NIC is a hardware that can connect the network to a computer. In the most situations network engineers uses NIC with LAN cable. There is two type of NICs:
1. Internal NICs
2. External NICs
Internal NICs are the most common and faster more than externals. There is two type of Internal NICs:
1. Wired NICs
2. Wireless NICs
Wired NICs are the most common. There are exist in most computers and old laptops and of course computer servers. Wired NIC needs a LAN cable to connect to network like this picture below:
As you can see this NIC have a Ethernet port for connecting to network. And a PCI connection for connecting to motherboard on computer.
But wireless NICs needs no wire or cable to connect to the network. Here we have a picture of them:
New laptops are slim. Very very slim and they don’t have any port for LAN to connecting to wired networks. Maybe you are a network engineer and you want to connect your Macbook to the network with Ethernet, external NICs will help you. External NICs connect to your USB hub and transfer the data from your USB to network. We also have wired and wireless external NICs as you can see in these pictures below:
MAC address?
Every NIC have a special identifier number. It works like a phone number. When NIC want to share data from device to device the MAC address will help us. Sharing data without MAC address is impossible. When the NIC cards are made at the factory, the MAC address is programmed in a chip called the ROM. ROMs are also exist in motherboards and there ROMs works for bios.
Usually MAC address are wrote on NICs. MAC address is a 12 — figure phrase is a sum of numbers and letters. Base value of MAC address is 0–15 (16 numbers). They use 0–9 for first 10 numbers and A-B-C-D-E-F for 11–15. This system of coding called Hexadecimal and that’s worked perfect on binary values.
Example of a MAC address
If you want to see what is your MAC address you can try these commands in different operating systems:
Windows:
ipconfig /allGNU/Linux:
ip aMac os:
ifconfig /allNote -> a better way in windows is getmac command. You just have to type it on cmd and press enter.
Something like this:
And yes, as you can see, physical address and MAC address have a same meaning. In this picture one of the mac addresses is:
08–71–90-B2–37–20Learn more
If you want to know more about MAC address and NICs you can see the Chapter 1 of CompTIA Network+. It will help’s you a lot.
Thanks for reading this article. My name is Padra and I teach what ever I learn in my life on my blog. If you like these kind of Network and hacking posts you can follow me on twitter and subscribe my channel at telegram. You can see my links and a little biography of myself:
