Clean up and reformat an example MAC address into colon and hyphen notation.
MAC addresses show up written in several different conventions depending on the vendor or system — colon-separated (00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E), hyphen-separated (00-1A-2B-3C-4D-5E), Cisco's dot-grouped form (001A.2B3C.4D5E), or no separators at all. This tool accepts any of those formats and outputs all of them at once, so you can grab whichever one the system you're working with expects.
It also decodes the OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier) — the first three bytes of a MAC address, which are assigned to a specific manufacturer — though this tool doesn't look up the actual manufacturer name, since that requires a full, regularly-updated vendor database this lightweight tool doesn't carry. It does indicate whether the address is locally administered or universally administered, and whether it's a unicast or multicast address, both of which are determined directly by specific bits in the first byte.
Worked example: 00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E reformats cleanly into all four notations, and its first byte (00, or 00000000 in binary) reveals two things from specific bit positions: the least significant bit is 0, meaning unicast (a 1 there would mean multicast); the second-least significant bit is also 0, meaning universally administered — assigned by the manufacturer at the factory, as opposed to locally administered addresses (which have that bit set to 1) that get manually reconfigured, often for virtual machines or privacy-focused randomization.
Not currently — that requires looking up the OUI against a full, regularly-updated vendor database, which this lightweight tool doesn’t carry. It does show you the OUI itself, which you can look up against a public database if needed.
It means the MAC address was set by software (like a VM or a manually configured network interface) rather than burned in by the original hardware manufacturer — indicated by a specific bit in the first byte of the address.
No — it only checks and reformats the structure (12 valid hex characters). It has no way to check whether a given address is actually assigned to a real device.