how to get a client's MAC address from HttpServlet?

Asked 2009-05-08T14:14:50.677

I was asked to write a servlet that collects client's details such as ip, mac address etc.

getting his IP is pretty straight-forward (request.getRemoteAddr()) but I dont find an elegant way to get his MAC address.

seems reasonable that the web server has access to data such as Mac address etc, since it gets the TCP packets and all. does this data registers somewhere? is it accessible?

(I'm working on top of Tomcat6)

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This isn't possible through the HttpServlet class.

The only way I can think of possibly gettnig a users MAC address is to use Javascript on the client side to retrieve it and then place it in a cookie that your server can then read. But, I don't know if it's possible to get MAC addr using Javascript - would seem like a security risk for a browser to allow you to do this as it's going outside the browser's sandbox but maybe there's some hack around to do it.

answered 2009-05-08T14:29:23.840

how to get a client's MAC address from HttpServlet?

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