Discovering Your Bluetooth Mac Address
November 12th, 2006 by Stephen
The problem is this: You want to connect to your Macintosh using bluetooth from a device that has a very basic bluetooth API, and which needs your bluetooth device MAC (hardware) address. What is the MAC address of your Macintosh bluetooth device?
There is a handy Unix utility for looking at your network interfaces that the Mac implements – this is the ifconfig utility. You can use ifconfig to find the hardware address of your other network interfaces – Ethernet, WiFi and Firewire. Unfortunately the bluetooth device is not listed.
The MAC address does not show up with ifconfig, nor in the system log files. So I ended up using my Mac Mini, and installing iStumbler , which can browse for nearby bluetooth devices and display information such as their Mac address, as in the example below:
I could have achieved the same results with the lightblue bluetooth python API or rfcomm on another Linux box with bluetooth. It turns out, however, that there is a much easier way. In one of those classic “smack your head with a wet fish” moments, I thought to click the Apple menu and choose “about this Mac”. There under the “bluetooth” heading I found this:
Oh well. iStumbler is an interesting application, and now I know the hardware addresses of bluetooth on all of our Macs and every other bluetooth device too.
