Ubuntu Manpage: get-oui - Fetch the arp-scan OUI file from the IEEE website (on Debian and Debian based systems, data is

NAME

       get-oui  - Fetch the arp-scan OUI file from the IEEE website (on Debian and Debian based systems, data is
       fetched from ieee-data package)

SYNOPSIS

       get-oui [options]

DESCRIPTION

get-oui fetches the Ethernet OUI file from the IEEE website, and saves it in the format used by arp-scan.

The OUI file contains all of the OUIs (Organizationally Unique Identifiers) that have been registered
with IEEE. Each OUI entry in the file specifies the first 24-bits of the 48-bit Ethernet hardware
address, leaving the remaining 24-bits for use by the registering organisation. For example the OUI
entry "080020", registered to Sun Microsystems, applies to any Ethernet hardware address from
08:00:20:00:00:00 to 08:00:20:ff:ff:ff inclusive. Each OUI assignment represents a total of 2^24
(16,777,216) Ethernet addresses.

Every major Ethernet hardware vendor registers an OUI for their equipment, and larger vendors will need
to register more than one. For example, 3Com have a total of 37 OUI entries. Organisations that only
produce a small number of Ethernet devices will often obtain an IAB registration instead. See get-iab(1)
for details.

This script can be used to update the arp-scan OUI file from the latest data on the IEEE website. Most
of the Ethernet addresses in use belong to an OUI registration, so this is the most important of the
files that arp-scan uses to decode Ethernet hardware addresses. You should therefore run get-oui
occasionally to keep the arp-scan OUI file up to date.

The OUI data is fetched from the URL http://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui/oui.txt (on Debian and Debian
based systems, data is fetched from ieee-data package) and the output file is saved to the file ieee-
oui.txt in the current directory. The URL to fetch the data from can be changed with the -u option, and
the output file name can be changed with the -f option.

The ieee-oui.txt file that is produced by this script is used by arp-scan to determine the Ethernet card
vendor from its hardware address.

The directory that arp-scan will look for the ieee-oui.txt file depends on the options used when it was
built. If it was built using the default options, then it will look in /usr/local/share/arp-scan.

OPTIONS

       -h     Display a brief usage message and exit.

       -f <fn>
              Write the output to the specified file instead of the default ieee-oui.txt.

       -u <URL>
              Use the specified URL to fetch the raw OUI data from  instead  of  the  default  http://standards-
              oui.ieee.org/oui/oui.txt.   (on  Debian  and  Debian based systems, data is fetched from ieee-data
              package)

       -v     Display verbose progress messages.

FILES

       ieee-oui.txt
              The default output file.

EXAMPLES

       $ get-oui -v
       Renaming ieee-oui.txt to ieee-oui.txt.bak
       Fetching OUI data from http://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui/oui.txt
       Fetched 3467133 bytes
       Opening output file ieee-oui.txt
       22402 OUI entries written to file ieee-oui.txt

NOTES

       get-oui is implemented in Perl, so you need to have the Perl interpreter installed on your system to  use
       it.

       get-oui  uses  the LWP::UserAgent Perl module to fetch the data from the IEEE website. You must have this
       module installed on your system for it to work. This module is available  on  most  distributions,  often
       called libwww-perl.  It is also available in source form from CPAN.

       You can use a proxy server by defining the http_proxy environment variable.

AUTHOR

       Roy Hills <Roy.Hills@nta-monitor.com>