Virtual MAC addresses
Submitted by jlmathew on January 23, 2016 - 5:53pm
Hello all, I received a very good email from a student, posted below:
As part of lab assignment 3, we have to look up our mac addresses on our devices. I had no issues finding it on my Android Samsung phone and on my Nintendo Wii. When I look it up on my laptop, I receive 3 different mac addresses (well, 7 actually, but the other 4 are just zeroes). Instructions say to take the first mac address and input the first 3 hex digits into the IEEE website. Doing so yields no results. The other addresses shown are fine.
The hex digits are: AA-9F-FA. This is listed under "Wireless LAN adapter Wireless Network Connection 2." Description is "Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter," and the media state is disconnected. I did this look this up and found an article or two, but not being very tech savvy myself, I didn't really understand them.
My laptop is a HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook PC from ~6 years ago (feels fairly ancient). I don't know if you need my product and serial number for this. Thanks,
So, IF you run into this situation, there is a reason. This student was looking at a 'virtual' (notice the name 'Microsoft Virtual WiFI Miniport Adapter' port. Certain software adds a virtual wifi port to your computer. What is 'virtual'? In essence, it means 'not real', as it does not exist physically. It is used to bridge certain software to certain systems. As microsoft tends to do things their way, the adapter helps to keep older software compatible.
Two common examples of this are:
Your hard drive. Many times, some hard drives (on windows) are partitioned into a c: and d: drives, even if they both exist on the same physical hard drive. This allows windows to use letters to map to drives, even if the drives do not exist physically!
Another example is virtual memory. If your computer/device runs out of physical (real) memory, the system will use virtual memory, which is mapped to your storage device (flash for tablets, hard drives for computers). By doing this, we can take a 1 Gig ram computer, and instead of crashing, have it use storage like memory (its actually swapped between physical ram and the storage, with the least used program memory going to storage).
Why do we do this? Avoid systems from crashing due to too little memory.
Why do we not like this? Virtual memory is SLOOOOOOOOOOW. It kills performance. While common ram can be accessed in 50ns cycles, hard drives can take miliseconds (an order of 1 million times slower!) Flash is faster (fast to read, slow to write), but is still significantly slower than physical ram.
So, if you see an adaptor listed as 'virtual', you can exclude it. It wont have a real manufacture ID, as it isnt real!
Hope this helps,
James
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