Early june, I blogged about Wake-on-LAN from a Windows machine.
My plan was to adopt [Wayback/Archive.is] Wake.ps1 into Wake-on-LAN.ps1 (as naming is important).
One of the goals was to support multiple hardware MAC address formats, especially as Wake.ps1 had the below comment, but did support the AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF, though not the AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF hardware MAC address format:
<#
...
.NOTES
Make sure the MAC addresses supplied don't contain "-" or ".".
#>
A colon separated hardware MAC address would result in this error inside the call to the [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.Parse Method (System.Net.NetworkInformation) | Microsoft Docs:
Send-Packet : Exception calling "Parse" with "1" argument(s): "An invalid physical address was specified."
So I did some digging, starting inside the above mentioned blog post, and adding more:
- Wake.ps1 uses the [Wayback/Archive.is]
Parse method in the [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.cs source code in C# .NET, which contains code like this:
//has dashes?
if (address.IndexOf('-') >= 0 ){
hasDashes = true;
buffer = new byte[(address.Length+1)/3];
}
- The Perl script at [Wayback/Archive.is] wakeonlan/wakeonlan at master · jpoliv/wakeonlan that started my first blog post in this series which mentions:
xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (canonical)xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx (Windows)xxxxxx-xxxxxx (Hewlett-Packard switches)xxxxxxxxxxxx (Intel Landesk)
I should rename the first one IEEE 802, as per this:
- The MAC address: Notational conventions – Wikipedia
The standard (IEEE 802) format for printing EUI-48 addresses in human-friendly form is six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens (-) in transmission order (e.g. 01-23-45-67-89-AB). This form is also commonly used for EUI-64 (e.g. 01-23-45-67-89-AB-CD-EF).[2] Other conventions include six groups of two hexadecimal digits separated by colons (:) (e.g. 01:23:45:67:89:AB), and three groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by dots (.) (e.g. 0123.4567.89AB); again in transmission order.[30]
The latter is used by Cisco (see for instance [Wayback/Archive.is] Cisco DCNM Security Configuration Guide, Release 4.0 – Configuring MAC ACLs [Support] – Cisco and [Wayback/Archive.is] Cisco IOS LAN Switching Command Reference – mac address-group through revision [Support] – Cisco), so another format to add:
- [Wayback/Archive.is] PhysicalAddress.Parse Method (System.Net.NetworkInformation) | Microsoft Docs remarks:
The address parameter must contain a string that can only consist of numbers and letters as hexadecimal digits. Some examples of string formats that are acceptable are as follows:
00112233445500-11-22-33-44-550011.2233.445500:11:22:33:44:55F0-E1-D2-C3-B4-A5f0-e1-d2-c3-b4-a5
Use the GetAddressBytes method to retrieve the address from an existing PhysicalAddress instance.
- After a bit more digging via [Wayback/Archive.is] “three groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by dots” – Google Search , I found that even more hardware MAC address formats are in use as per [Wayback/Archive.is] What are the various standard and industry practice ways to express a 48-bit MAC address? – Network Engineering Stack Exchange.
I really do not have all the sources for the various representations for 48-bit MAC addresses, but I have seen them variously used:
AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF
AA.BB.CC.DD.EE.FF
AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD
AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD
AAA:BBB:CCC:DDD
AAAA-BBBB-CCCC
AAAA.BBBB.CCCC
AAAA:BBBB:CCCC
AAAAAA-BBBBBB
AAAAAA.BBBBBB
AAAAAA:BBBBBB
From the last list, which is far more complete than the others, I recognise quite a few from tools I used in the past, but too forgot the actual sources, so I took the full list from there and tried to name them in parenthesis after the links I found above and what I remembered:
AABBCCDDEEFF (Bare / Landesk)AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF (IEEE 802 / Windows)AA.BB.CC.DD.EE.FF (???)AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF (Linux / BSD / MacOS)AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD (???)AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD (Cisco?)AAA:BBB:CCC:DDD (???)AAAA-BBBB-CCCC (???)AAAA.BBBB.CCCC (Cisco / Brocade)AAAA:BBBB:CCCC (???)AAAAAA-BBBBBB (Hewlett-Packard networking)AAAAAA.BBBBBB (???)AAAAAA:BBBBBB (???)
Some additional links in addition to the ones above:
–jeroen
Anonymous
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 