Q: I have a Sony Clié PEG TH-55 that I'm trying to connect to a wireless network restricted to known devices. Before I can connect, I need to register my handheld with the service, which requires the MAC address. Where can I find the MAC address of my PEG TH-55?
A: Many portable devices list the MAC addresses for their ethernet and wireless cards on a sticker on the reverse of the device. On a Sony Clié PEG TH-55, you'll need to look a little harder.
A MAC address is a unique address associated with your wireless communication card for your handheld. Any communications card installed in a device which can connect to a wide area network has a unique address. If you have both a wireless connection and an ethernet connection on your computer, the ethernet card would have a MAC address and the wireless card would have a different MAC address. These addresses are assigned when the cards are manufactured. It is possible to get your PEG TH-55 to tell you its own MAC address by stepping through the following:
Launch the Palm "Prefs" application.
From the top right drop-down menu, choose "Network". You'll be shown a page which says "Service" and has "Details" and "Connect" buttons at the bottom.
Click on the "Service" drop-down menu and choose "Wireless LAN".
Click on the "Details" button at the bottom of the screen. This takes you to the "Wireless LAN Setup" page.
Click in the upper left corner of the screen, where the title bar is, to bring up the "options" or click on the "options" icon (2nd from the bottom left) on the bottom of the screen. The title bar will be replaced with a menu which says "Information" and has the choice of "ConnectionStatus".
Choose the "ConnectionStatus" menu option. The very first thing listed is your 12-character MAC address.
You now have your MAC address.
Note that if you're registering this with a service, sometimes they don't want any spaces or colons in the address, or may want it in lowercase.
Have fun!
Posted by Eingang at October 28, 2004 04:29 PM | TrackBackI have a similiar problem. My network restricts access by limiting to known MAC addresses. Yesterday I received my new San Disk WiFi card for my Tapwave Zodiac 2, which runs on Palm OS 5-T. When I follow the directions above, I get the MAC address for the SanDisk wifi card which is 00:00:00:00:00:00. Our Linksys Wireless-G Broadband Router still doesn't recognize this. Is there a different MAC address for the PDA than the wireless card? (Unlike the Clie, my wireless is not built in.) Or is there a way to change the MAC address of the SanDisk wireless card to one that our router will recognize? Thanks.
Posted by: Mark Pierce at December 9, 2004 02:29 PM