Question

I’ve been trying write an application which will be able to connect to a network device via rndis or over wifi and perform some simple operations.

The kicker is that I want to be able to find a device I’ve connected to before, through either connection method. I initially figured I’d just check for a previously seen mac address, but I discovered that the rndis mac address and the wifi mac address don’t match. I’m on windows so the next thing I tried was to use nbtstat -A and ping -a, but those didn’t turn up anything unique either (I figured I might get a device name, but it doesn’t seem to have one).

So my question is, is there any tool (ideally available for windows), which will allow me to retrieve some sort of unique information about a network device that will allow me to find it again? I don’t have a huge amount of experience in this field so I’m not sure exactly what that would be, but I hoped that there may be a way to get the mac addresses for both network adapters while only connected to one, or perhaps use a different tool to find a device name that I’d missed.

Thank you for any advice you might give, I really appreciate it. Sorry if I’m overly wordy.

EDIT: In case I’ve been ambiguous. I am connecting repeatedly to an external device via RNDIS or WIFI from my desktop PC. My goal is to be able to consistently recognize the network device regardless of the connection method used.

EDIT: By networked device, I mean that I have small independant devices (such as cell phones or tablets) running a unix os, which I access from my Windows desktop via wifi or rndis, and that I would like to be able to consistently identify. So for example I might want to use this tool to connect to one of two cell phones and be able to recognize which one it is so I can recall previous operations performed with that device. So what I’m looking for is a unique (or semi unique) attribute of the cellphone available to me that is consistent when accessed via rndis or wifi.

Answer 1

You can get MAC address (and bunch of other network interface info) with built-in ipconfig command and parse its output later:

ipconfig /all

Alternatively, if MAC address is all you need, try getmac.