NAME

Net::MAC::Vendor - Look up the vendor for a MAC

VERSION

version 1.268

SYNOPSIS

        use Net::MAC::Vendor;

        my $mac = "00:0d:93:29:f6:c2";

        my $array = Net::MAC::Vendor::lookup( $mac );

You can also run this as a script with as many arguments as you like. The module realizes it is a script, looks up the information for each MAC, and outputs it.

        perl Net/MAC/Vendor.pm 00:0d:93:29:f6:c2 00:0d:93:29:f6:c5

DESCRIPTION

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) assigns an Organizational Unique Identifier (OUI) to manufacturers of network interfaces. Each interface has a Media Access Control (MAC) address of six bytes. The first three bytes are the OUI.

This module allows you to take a MAC address and turn it into the OUI and vendor information. You can, for instance, scan a network, collect MAC addresses, and turn those addresses into vendors. With vendor information, you can often guess at what what you are looking at (e.g. an Apple product).

You can use this as a module as its individual functions, or call it as a script with a list of MAC addresses as arguments. The module can figure it out.

The IEEE moves the location of its OUI file. If they do that again, you can set the NET_MAC_VENDOR_OUI_URL environment variable to get the new URL without updating the code.

Here are some of the old URLs, which also flip-flop schemes:

        http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt
        https://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt
        http://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui.txt
        http://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui/oui.txt

There are older copies of the OUI file in the GitHub repository.

These files are large (about 4MB), so you might want to cache a copy.

A different source of information is linuxnet.ca that publishes sanitized and compressed versions of the list, such as:

        http://linuxnet.ca/ieee/oui.txt.bz2

The module can read and decompress compressed versions (as long as the url reflects the compression type in the filename as the linuxnet.ca links do).

Functions

run( @macs )

If I call this module as a script, this class method automatically runs. It takes the MAC addresses and prints the registered vendor information for each address. I can pass it a list of MAC addresses and run() processes each one of them. It prints out what it discovers.

This method does try to use a cache of OUI to cut down on the times it has to access the network. If the cache is fully loaded (perhaps using load_cache), it may not even use the network at all.

ua

Return the Mojo::UserAgent object used to fetch resources.

lookup( MAC )

Given the MAC address, return an anonymous array with the vendor information. The first element is the vendor name, and the remaining elements are the address lines. Different records may have different numbers of lines, although the first two should be consistent.

This makes a direct request to the IEEE website for that OUI to return the information for that vendor.

The normalize_mac() function explains the possible formats for MAC.

normalize_mac( MAC )

Takes a MAC address and turns it into the form I need to send to the IEEE lookup, which is the first six bytes in hex separated by hyphens. For instance, 00:0d:93:29:f6:c2 turns into 00-0D-93.

The input string can be a separated by colons or hyphens. They can omit leading 0's (which might make things look odd). We only need the first three bytes

        00:0d:93:29:f6:c2   # usual form

        00-0d-93-29-f6-c2   # with hyphens

        00:0d:93            # first three bytes

        0:d:93              # missing leading zero

        :d:93               # missing all leading zeros

The input string can also be a blessed NetAddr::MAC object.

fetch_oui( MAC )

Looks up the OUI information on the IEEE website, or uses a cached version of it. Pass it the result of normalize_mac() and you should be fine.

The normalize_mac() function explains the possible formats for MAC.

To avoid multiple calls on the network, use load_cache to preload the entire OUI space into an in-memory cache. This can take a long time over a slow network, though; the file is about 60,000 lines.

Also, the IEEE website has been flaky lately, so loading the cache is better. This distribution comes with several versions of the complete OUI data file.

fetch_oui_from_custom( MAC, [ URL ] )

Looks up the OUI information from the specified URL or the URL set in the NET_MAC_VENDOR_OUI_SOURCE environment variable.

The normalize_mac() function explains the possible formats for MAC.

fetch_oui_from_ieee( MAC )

Looks up the OUI information on the IEEE website. Pass it the result of normalize_mac() and you should be fine.

The normalize_mac() function explains the possible formats for MAC.

fetch_oui_from_cache( MAC )

Looks up the OUI information in the cached OUI information (see load_cache).

The normalize_mac() function explains the possible formats for MAC.

To avoid multiple calls on the network, use load_cache to preload the entire OUI space into an in-memory cache.

If it doesn't find the MAC in the cache, it returns nothing.

extract_oui_from_html( HTML, OUI )

Gets rid of the HTML around the OUI information. It may still be ugly. The HTML is the search results page of the IEEE ouisearch lookup.

Returns false if it could not extract the information. This could mean unexpected input or a change in format.

parse_oui( STRING )

Takes a string that looks like this:

        00-03-93   (hex)            Apple Computer, Inc.
        000393     (base 16)        Apple Computer, Inc.
                                                                20650 Valley Green Dr.
                                                                Cupertino CA 95014
                                                                UNITED STATES

and turns it into an array of lines. It discards the first line, strips the leading information from the second line, and strips the leading whitespace from all of the lines.

With no arguments, it returns an empty anonymous array.

oui_url
oui_urls

Returns the URLs of the oui.txt resource. The IEEE likes to move this around. These are the default URL that load_cache will use, but you can also supply your own with the NET_MAC_VENDOR_OUI_URL environment variable.

load_cache( [ SOURCE[, DEST ] ] )

Downloads the current list of all OUIs in SOURCE, parses it with parse_oui(), and stores it in the cache. The fetch_oui() will use this cache if it exists.

By default, this uses the URL from oui_url, but given an argument, it tries to use that.

If the url indicates that the data is compressed, the response content is decompressed before being stored.

If load_cache cannot load the data, it issues a warning and returns nothing.

This previously used DBM::Deep if it was installed, but that was much too slow. Instead, if you want persistence, you can play with $Net::MAC::Vendor::Cached yourself.

If you want to store the data fetched for later use, add a destination filename to the request. To fetch from the default location and store, specify undef as source.

Caching

Eventually I want people to write their own caching classes so I've created some class methods for this.

add_to_cache( OUI, PARSED_DATA )

Add to the cache. This is mostly in place for a future expansion to full objects so you can override this in a subclass.

get_from_cache( OUI )

Get from the cache. This is mostly in place for a future expansion to full objects so you can override this in a subclass.

get_cache_hash()

Get the hash the built-in cache uses. You should only use this if you were using the old $Cached package variable.

1; __END__

SEE ALSO

Net::MacMap

SUPPORT

Bugs may be submitted through the RT bug tracker (or bug-Net-MAC-Vendor@rt.cpan.org).

I am also usually active on irc, as 'ether' at irc.perl.org and irc.libera.chat.

AUTHOR

brian d foy <bdfoy@cpan.org>

CONTRIBUTORS

  • brian d foy <brian.d.foy@gmail.com>

  • Karen Etheridge <ether@cpan.org>

  • Frank Maas <maas.frank@gmail.com>

  • openstrike <git@openstrike.co.uk>

  • Christopher Layne <clayne@anodized.com>

  • Dean Hamstead <dean@fragfest.com.au>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is Copyright (c) 2004 by brian d foy.

This is free software, licensed under:

  The Artistic License 2.0 (GPL Compatible)