Re: Ping a mac address

From: James Eaton-Lee (james.mailing@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Dec 07 2005 - 06:59:18 EST


On Sun, 2005-12-04 at 11:11 +0100, rob.dijkshoorn@planet.nl wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Seems to me you are mixing up osi-layer functionality.
>
> A MAC-address is a layer 2 (physical) address.

layer two is the data link layer, layer one is the physical layer. :-P

 - James.

> This address only has
> significance on the local broadcast domain. In ip-terms, your local subnet.
> Ping is a layer 4 protocol, used to check end-to-end connectivity
> between ip-adresses. You can't use ping to ping a mac-address, since the
> protocol underlying ping (ICMP) won't understand it.
>
> What you want to do is translate between ip- and mac-addresses. For
> this, the address resolution protocol (ARP) is used, alongside its
> brother, the reverse address resolution protocol (RARP). If you want to
> figure out what ip-address belongs to a specific mac, you need RARP. The
> fastest way to check this is to check the arp cache on the switch.
>
> As for tools... i guess some good suggestions have been made on the list
> already.
>
> regards,
> Rob

-- 
James (njan) Eaton-Lee | 10807960
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