=== Investigation 6: How do I collect the MAC (Hardware) addresses of computers on my network? ===

While we use 32bit IP addresses to communicate over an internetwork, on the local ethernet network packets are delivered to a 48bit hardware address (sometimes called a MAC address). The ARP protocol resolves 32bit IP addresses to 48bit MAC addresses by using a broadcast and caching the results. We can examine the ARP cache to get the MAC addresses of other computers on our local network.