I’m working in very big oil and gas company. We have many many access points in our offices, each access point broadcasts 3 SSID’s. The access points with roaming system. On the back of each access point there is a MAC address.
Until now I have tried to use many applications to get the MAC address but the results are not accurate. Also a mbile application to find access point MAC address I failed. I guess this is because the wireless roaming designed to make the device feel they are connected the same access points while the user moving to another place?
Can somebody introduce me to a way or application that very accurate to show the mac address with access point that function on wireless roaming? I’m using Ubuntu Linux.
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Best Answer
There is no widely-supported standard for finding every MAC address of every AP on a network. If being able to find that out is important to you, upgrade to an enterprise-class wireless network infrastructure solution, and use the management tools that are part of the solution you purchased.
Note that APs usually have several different MAC addresses used for different purposes. For example, each wired Ethernet port could have its own MAC address, each wireless interface could have its own MAC address (typically used as the BSSID for each BSS), and APs that can publish multiple SSIDs often have a range of MAC addresses they can use so that each SSID gets it won BSSID. For example, Cisco APs (real enterprise Cisco, not the consumer-ish Linksys-based stuff) often have a range of 16 MAC addresses they can use. So if the AP says its base MAC address is 00:11:22:33:44:50, it can actually use all the way to 00:11:22:33:44:5f for its BSSIDs. This is separate from its wired Ethernet port's MAC address.
Do you even know what the MAC address on the label of your APs is supposed to be? Is it supported to be the one for the first Ethernet port? The second Ethernet port? The 2.4GHz Wi-Fi radio? The 5GHz Wi-Fi radio?
That said, one way to see what MAC address is actually in use on an AP's Wi-Fi interface is to associate a client to that interface and ask the client what BSSID it's associated to. On Ubuntu I believe the "iwconfig" command will tell you this. On a Mac, you can get this by holding down the option key while clicking on the Wi-Fi Menu Extra. Note that this only tells you the MAC address of the Wi-Fi interface you're associated to on this one AP.
Wi-Fi scanner tools, of which there are too many to list, can report the BSSIDs of all APs in radio range. If a single AP is has more than one BSSID, you should see them all listed. But to gather the list of all the BSSIDs of all the APs at your site, you'd have to walk around with your laptop (or whatever) to get in range of all the devices, in order to see their Beacon and Probe Response transmission so you can see their MAC addresses.