P5-net-mac-vendor

Look up the vendor for a MAC

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE assigns an Organizational Unique Identifier OUI to manufacturers of network interfaces. Each interface has a Media Access Control MAC address of six bytes. The first three bytes are the OUI.

This module allows you to take a MAC address and turn it into the OUI and vendor information. You can, for instance, scan a network, collect MAC addresses, and turn those addresses into vendors. With vendor information, you can often guess at what you are looking at e.g. an Apple product.

You can use this as a module as its individual functions, or call it as a script with a list of MAC addresses as arguments. The module can figure it out.

This module tries to persistently cache with DBMDeep the OUI information so it can avoid using the network. If it cannot load DBMDeep, it uses a normal hash which is lost when the process finishes. You can preload this cache with the load_cache function. So far, the module looks in the current working directory for a file named mac_oui.db to find the cache. I need to come up with a way to let the user set that location.