You should know your Mac’s IP address for two reasons: The first is that it is commonly needed for setting up printers and other devices on a network. Secondly, it helps you protect your computer against malware. There are different ways to find out your IP address on a Mac; we’ll be discussing 3 of them below. We’ll first how to find the internal IP address of your Mac, and then the external one. After that, we’ll discuss how to find your MAC address.
1. Find Your Internal IP Address Using System Preferences
To quickly find your IP Address:
1. Open up System Preferences using the Apple Menu or Spotlight.
2. Locate and click on “Network”.
3. Select your currently active network in the left-pane.
3. Once selected, your IP address will be present in the middle corner of the window:
2. Find Your Internal IP Address Using Terminal
This is the most easiest way for those of you who are more technologically inclined i.e more used to commands:
1. Open up Terminal via the Spotlight or by navigating to “Applications -> Utilities”.
2. Once Terminal is open, type in the following command:
ifconfig | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1
This command will remove the 127.0.0.1 address from the window, which is a feedback loop and should be ignored while finding an IP address.
3. Your IP address will be located next to “inet”:
3. Finding Your External IP Address Using Chrome
Your External IP Address is the one that is broadcast to the world instead of a local network. An external IP address is used to identify your computer on the internet and can be used to identify your Internet provider; so we’d recommend never giving this to anyone.
1. Open up your internet browser and navigate to google.com
2. Search for “ip address”.
3. The first result will show your external IP address.
Finding Your MAC Address
A MAC address is a unique identifier that is assigned to each physical network interface present on a computer/Mac. MAC address are very often used for network access control and to monitor network connectivity, which makes it different from IP addresses. Here’s how to find your MAC address in OS X:
1. Open up System Preferences using the Apple Menu or Spotlight.
2. Locate and click on “Network”.
3. Select your currently active network in the left-pane.
4. Click on “Advanced” present in the bottom of the window.
5. Look at the bottom of the window for “Wi-Fi Address”, the hexadecimal characters next to this are the machines MAC address.
Your MAC address will always be in the form of aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff, looking something like “ce:9e:8d:02:1d:e9?” or a variation of.
(Note: In OS X 10.6 Leopard or before, this MAC address will be labelled as “Airport Address”; while on OS X 10.7 Lion and newer, it will be labelled as “Wi-Fi Address.”)
Shujaa Imran is MakeTechEasier’s resident Mac tutorial writer. He’s currently training to follow his other passion become a commercial pilot. You can check his content out on Youtube
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