Finding Original MAC Address from Hardware Itself

Identify network adapter only with MAC Address

No, the MAC Address is simply a unique Identifier for each network adapter. You can think of it as a unique random number coded directly into the networking hardware, so that it can never change. You can figure out the vendor, because "blocks" of MAC addresses are assigned to each vendor, in order to ensure that no one gets a card with a duplicate address. To which models the addresses are assigned is up to the vendor, and it is highly unlikely that a vendor will publish such a list.

In order to obtain the information you need, you will have to use a OS/Programming language specific function. If you can tell us what environment you are working on, maybe someone can help you figure out how to get the information.

Get device details from MAC Address

The only information you can get from a MAC address is the manufacturer, you can find a list here: http://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/oui/oui.txt . Keep in mind that this is the manufacturer of the network interface, it's possible to have a network interface from vendor A inside a device of vendor B.

To get more information you need to connect to the device, probably using the IP address, not the MAC address. You can use WMI for Windows, SSH for Linux and SNMP for printers/switches/PSU's etc.

MAC Address as Serial Number in Embedded Systems

MAC Addresses are generated randomly by the manufacturer but as far as I understood there is a slight chance (0.000001% perhaps) that the MAC Address will be duplicate. i.e. it is not entirely unique.

How to get the Permanent MAC Address

To get the smbios mac address you can use dmidecode. dmidecode dumps the boxes DMI table contents so all the systems hardware components, as well as serial numbers, and BIOS revisions.

 [root@server ~]# dmidecode | grep -i mac
                MCE (Machine check exception)
                MCA (Machine check architecture)
HP BIOS NIC PCI and MAC Information
        NIC 1: PCI device 03:00.0, MAC address 1C:69:F5:4B:24:Y8
        NIC 2: PCI device 03:00.1, MAC address 1C:69:F5:4B:24:Y8
HP BIOS iSCSI NIC PCI and MAC Information

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