There are a few 3rd party user friendly GUI tools such as Cain & Able, Win IP Config, Routing Table GUI that runs on Java, and HoverIP, that claims to have the feature to manipulate Windows route table but unfortunately most of them don’t work very well in the sense that it only shows the routing table, but is unable to add, remove or modify an existing route. Microsoft Windows clients will follow a sequence of methods in attempting to resolve a name to an address, stopping the search when it successfully matches a name to an IP address. There are two main sequences used in almost all cases: NetBIOS resolution and Host name resolution.
Metric comes into play if there are multiple routes to the same destination. The path with the lowest metric is used if if available. This comes more into play on a network with multiple routers and/or switches where some paths are less desirable (either they include more hops to get to the same end point, traverse slower links, etc).
The interface number is listed in your 'route print' output:
The first number is the interface number then you get a few dots to separate it for padding from its MAC address.
Your Intel Ethernet is '8', Wireless is '2'. Microsoft Wi-Fi virtuals are 10 and 18.
Written by ouilookup
Updated on2020-04-16
Pinging ports and computers is probably one of the best troubleshooting methods available.
Used by network administrators daily, “ping” can be quite useful in order to see if a host is up or not.
However, in some cases, you may need to be able to ping a MAC address in order to see if the host is up or not.
In this tutorial, we are going to explain how you can easily ping a MAC address on various operating systems (Windows and Linux).
Ping MAC Address on Windows
The easiest way to ping a MAC address on Windows is to use the “ping” command and to specify the IP address of the computer you want to verify.
Whether the host is contacted, your ARP table will be populated with the MAC address, thus validating that the host is up and running.
First of all, open a command line on Windows with Administrator privileges.
In order to open CMD, you can go to the bottom left corner of your Windows Desktop, and search for “CMD“.
When your command line is open, hit the “arp” command with the “-a” in order to see your current ARP table.
If you need help on how ARP and MAC are linked, this is already explained in one of our tutorials on MAC addresses.
By default, the ARP command will list your network interfaces and the entries (IP address with MAC addresses) that are already known by your operating system.
In this case, as you can see, we have two network interfaces having one ARP entry each (configured as static).
For those who are curious, the 01-00-5E prefix is the start for multicast MAC addresses assigned by the IANA.
Now let’s say that we want to know the MAC adress of our default gateway available at 192.168.178.1/24.
In order to ping this MAC address, we are going to use the “ping” command and specify the IP address to be used.
Under the hood, your operating system will first send a ARP ping request followed by an ICMP request to the corresponding request.
As you can see, the “ping” was successful in our case : we got some replies from the distant host.
Now, let’s see the corresponding MAC address by using the “arp” command followed by the “-a” option.
As you can see, the MAC address of this router is CC-CE-1E (which is used by the AVM Audiovisuelles company)
Congratulations, you successfully pinged a MAC address on Windows 10!
ARP Ping on Windows
For those who are familiar with Linux, you probably know about the arpping command.
Luckily for you, there is an arpping command on Windows under the “arp-ping” name.
In order to use the arpping command, you can go to the official page of this command for Windows.
In there, simply click on the “arp-ping.exe” and store the executable wherever you want on your computer.
Next, open a CMD console (the way you opened it in the previous section) and navigate to the folder where you stored your “arp-ping.exe” executable.
In order to achieve that, you can use the “cd” command.
When you are in your folder, execute the “arp-ping” command and specify the IP address to be pinged with the command.
For this tutorial, let’s assume that we want to ping the default gateway of your local network located at 192.168.178.1/24.
As a consequence, we would type the following command
Awesome, you successfully pinged your MAC address on Windows using the “arp-ping” command.
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Ping MAC Address on Linux
The easiest way to ping a MAC address on Linux is to use the “arping” command and to specify the IP address to be pinged.
Similarly to Windows, if the host pings back, you will be presented with the MAC address you are interested in.
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.
Note that the arping command may not be installed by default on your system, you will need to install it.
In order to install it, you need sudo privileges.
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.
When you have administrator privileges, simply execute the “apt-get install” command and install the arping utility.
Finally, when the command is properly installed, you will be able to ping the MAC address correctly.
Congratulations, you were able to successfully ping a MAC address on Linux!
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Difference between ARP and ICMP
To be extremely clear, there is no such thing as “pinging” a MAC address.
This article was named this way because many developers and engineers are searching for it this way, but this is partially correct.
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.
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).
ICMP, however, is used on the Internet layer, meaning that there is no such thing as “pinging a MAC address“.
Under the hood, you are actually sending an ARP request first, waiting for the host to respond and learning about its MAC address.
When you are aware of the MAC address, you can actually send an ICMP request to the host in order to get the diagnosis back.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, you learnt how you can easily ping a MAC address on Windows and Linux.
Manual Add A Address Tftp Server Arp Table In Windows 10 Windows 7
If you are interested in MAC addresses or in networking, we have a complete series of tutorials available in our blog, make sure to check it out!
Manual Add A Address Tftp Server Arp Table In Windows 10 Download
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