ICMP, however, is used on the Internet layer, meaning that there is no such thing as “ pinging a MAC address“. However, if you learnt about the OSI model you probably know that MAC addresses are used on the layer two of the OSI model (data-link layer). When users refer to “ping”, they actually refer to the ICMP protocol which is a protocol used in order to diagnose and troubleshoot issues happening over a network. This article was named this way because many developers and engineers are searching for it this way, but this is partially correct. To be extremely clear, there is no such thing as “pinging” a MAC address. $ sudo apt-get install arpingįinally, when the command is properly installed, you will be able to ping the MAC address correctly.Ĭongratulations, you were able to successfully ping a MAC address on Linux! Difference between ARP and ICMP

When you have administrator privileges, simply execute the “apt-get install” command and install the arping utility. If you are not sure about how you can get sudo privileges on Linux, there are many different tutorials that you can use for Debian or CentOS. In order to install it, you need sudo privileges. Note that the arping command may not be installed by default on your system, you will need to install it. If the IP and MAC address pair aren't listed in the output, then you must first 'ping' the target IP.

By pinging the default gateway of this local network, we were able to determine that the MAC address 00:00:5E:00:01:6E is up and running. The quickest way to find all discovered MAC addresses is done listing all the current entries in the ARP table.

Using arp command to find mac address