Mar242012

How can I tell if I am connected to my router or repeater?

Kyle MacDonald asks:

I am trying to find a way that I can tell for sure that I am connected to my repeater or still to my router. Both of my routers are Cisco products. My signal will bounce up and down on my laptop when I am on it. I do see that there is a little bit of activity on the repeater here and there but nothing constant.

Is there a software or something to do to determine the MAC address that I am connected to or something else of the sort? Thanks in advance.


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System: Windows
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6 Answers -

0 votes

ha14

March 24, 2012

1) Click on START, and then click on
RUN
2) The RUN dialogue box will appear.
Type CMD and press ENTER
3) Now type IPCONFIG /ALL at the
command prompt and hit ENTER. 
4) The MAC Address you’re looking for will be listed under the heading Ethernet Adapter Wireless Network Connection

dEadY

This is wrong. Doing this will tell you what your own device’s MAC address is, not the router’s one.

As already suggested below, you can use “arp -a” to list all MAC addresses in your network. Figure out which IP your router has (mostly the gateway address shown in ipconfig) to match it with the correct MAC address.

October 29, 2012
0 votes

Bruce Epper

March 25, 2012

Most network traffic is not constant.  In the industry, the common phrase is “sporadic and bursty” and this is what you will see with the indicators on your network devices.  The activity light will be off for some time then all of a sudden, it just flashes like mad.  The fewer devices on that particular segment, the more “off” time the LEDs have unless you are streaming a movie or downloading a lot of content.

I’m not sure why you are asking about MAC addresses here, but if you want it, you can go to a command prompt and type “arp -a” (without the quotes) and it will display a list of IP addresses in one column and the physical (MAC) address in the adjacent column.  Just look for the line with the IP address of the device you want the MAC address for.

0 votes

i see u

March 27, 2012

right click bottom taskbar select task manager. networking tab. here it shows what u are connected to and the activity

0 votes

Tina

April 2, 2012

Thanks a lot for sharing your solution, Kyle!

0 votes

georgia pu gh

October 3, 2012

What suppose to happen when I do that. nothing happened

0 votes

dEadY

October 29, 2012

On Windows you can use Wireshark to figure out which MAC address your packets are sent to.
On Mac you have the “airport” utility to show the BSSID of the connected network.
On Mac and Linux you also have some switches with “iwconfig” to figure that out.