After dealing with several options, most of them involving a call to a command line tool and parsing the output, which is not really elegant. Other solutions were based on obsolete VBScript client code and ActiveX, even worse.
Finally I found in the excellent pinvoke.net site a very nice and simple example using a simple call to iphlpapi.dll’s SendARP method. The trick was to use ARP to get the MAC from the IP.
Note that this has it’s limitations, as I will only work if the remote machine is in the same network and the packet does not need to go through a router. I was enough for our needs.
Here’s the code I adapted from the example:
public static string GetMAC(IPAddress ipAddr)
{
var mac = new byte[6];
var len = (uint)mac.Length;
var result = SendARP((int)ipAddr.Address, 0, mac, ref len);
if (result != 0)
{
return "MAC not found!";
}
var str = new string[(int)len];
for (var i = 0; i < len; i++)
{
str[i] = mac[i].ToString("x2");
}
return string.Join(":", str);
}
[DllImport("iphlpapi.dll", ExactSpelling = true)]
private static extern int SendARP(int destIP, int srcIP, byte[] pMacAddr, ref uint phyAddrLen);
Enjoy!