about mac adress

[drhadidy]

hi guys... a couple of questions about mac adress:
-how can i determine the mac of my notebook?? i have E-17& KDE4 installed on my notebook.
-if i have a dual boot on my machine does it keep the same mac on both systems or it changes?
-i use virtualbox... when i connect to internet from the guest system... does my provider get the mac of the guest system or only of the host?
- if i have a wifi access point and connecting to internet through it... will my ISP get to see every mac of each machine connected or it will get only the mac of the AP?
im asking coz our ISP must be notified of how many machines i use to connect and their mac's for some security reasons... and i have 3 laptops and 5 mobile phones that can connect using the wifi... so i need to know how exactly this works...
thx alot

[muungwana]

you can know tha mac address of a computer by opening the terminal and type "ifconfig". The mac address is the number after HWaddr line

Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr MAC-ADDRESS
          inet addr:192.168.100.20  Bcast:192.168.100.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::2c0:a8ff:fe84:edae/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:35476 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:39253 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:6148149 (5.8 MiB)  TX bytes:30394779 (28.9 MiB)
          Interrupt:18 Base address:0xcc00

Mac address exist on a network device, each network device has its own unique address build into the hardware and the same number show up on alll running operating system.

The mac address that will be seen if you run virtualbox is that of the host

Most APs have routers build in and hence your ISP will only see the mac address of the router and hence yeyou can have as many computers connected to the AP and your ISP will not know about them..

[The Chief]

our ISP must be notified of how many machines i use to connect and their mac's for some security reasons... and i have 3 laptops and 5 mobile phones that can connect using the wifi... so i need to know how exactly this works...

Sounds like you are using an ISP provided wi-fi router.  Filtering by MAC address is a common security method for wi-fi, to prevent unauthorized machines from connecting to the access point.

So, in order to set it up to allow all your equipment to connect, they need the MAC addresses of all them.

Decent security, but it means a visitor (friend or family member) with a laptop won't be able to connect, unless you know how to add him and can get the MAC address of his laptop.