The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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:

1. 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]; 
               }

2. 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:

3. 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:

   • xxxx.xxxx.xxxx (Cisco)

4. [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:

   • 001122334455
   • 00-11-22-33-44-55
   • 0011.2233.4455
   • 00:11:22:33:44:55
   • F0-E1-D2-C3-B4-A5
   • f0-e1-d2-c3-b4-a5

   Use the GetAddressBytes method to retrieve the address from an existing PhysicalAddress instance.

5. 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:

• (Formerly Intel) Ivanty Landesk: [Wayback/Archive.is] Creating a Query to search by MAC Address
• Windows: [Wayback/Archive.is] arp | Microsoft Docs
• Linux: [Wayback/Archive.is] Linux networking: arp versus ip neighbour | Enable Sysadmin
• BSD: [Wayback/Archive.is] arp(8) – OpenBSD manual pages
• MacOS: [Wayback/Archive.is] init(string:) | Apple Developer Documentation
• Cisco: [Wayback/Archive.is] Cisco Nexus 5000 Series NX-OS Software Configuration Guide – Configuring the MAC Address Table [Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches] – Cisco
• Hewlett-Packard switches: [Wayback/Archive.is] Viewing the switch’s MAC address tables
• Brocade: [Archive.is] IBM b-type Data Center Networking: Design and Best Practices Introduction – Jon Tate, Norman Bogard, Michal Holenia, Sebastian Oglaza, Steven Tong, IBM Redbooks – Google Books / [Wayback/Archive.is] Network Fun!!! — A Security/Network Engineer’s Blog: How To Configure A Stack On A Brocade (Foundry) FCX648SHPOE

–jeroen