GET-IAB(1)

📦 version 1.9.7, in ubuntu jammy

💖 GET-IAB(1) 💖

okay bestie, grab a strawberry 🍓 and sit down, because we're talking about get-iab — a little icon from the General Commands Manual that goes and gets the IEEE's IAB list for you. it's giving errand-runner energy and honestly? we're obsessed.

✨ NAME ✨

get-iab — fetch the arp-scan IAB file from the IEEE website 🦋

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

get-iab [options]

👑 DESCRIPTION 👑

so like. get-iab goes and fetches the Ethernet IAB file from the IEEE website, and then saves it in the format that arp-scan uses. lowkey iconic. 💅

the IAB file holds all of the IABs (that's Individual Address Blocks, iykyk) that have been registered with IEEE. every IAB entry in the file specifies the first 36 bits of the 48-bit Ethernet hardware address, and it leaves the remaining 12 bits for the registering organisation to use however they want. main character behaviour tbh.

for example, the IAB entry 0050C2003, registered to Microsoft, applies to any Ethernet hardware address from 00:50:c2:00:30:00 to 00:50:c2:00:3f:ff inclusive. periodt. and every single IAB assignment represents a total of 2^12 (4,096) Ethernet addresses. that's a lot of addresses, no cap.

major Ethernet hardware vendors typically use an OUI registration rather than an IAB registration. see get-oui(1) for the details on that one 🫶

this script can be used to update the arp-scan IAB file from the latest data on the IEEE website. ngl, it's relatively rare to see Ethernet addresses from IAB registrations, so the IAB file is not as important as the OUI file. still cute though.

the IAB data gets fetched from the URL http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/iab.txt and the output file is saved to the file ieee-iab.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. so many options bestie, we love flexibility 🌈

the ieee-iab.txt file that this script produces is used by arp-scan to determine the Ethernet card vendor from its hardware address. it's giving detective work 🔥

the directory that arp-scan will look for the ieee-iab.txt file in 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. remember that, it's important 💜

✨ OPTIONS ✨

  • -h — display a brief usage message and exit. cute, quick, efficient 🎀
  • -f <fn> — write the output to the specified file instead of the default ieee-iab.txt. name it whatever you want bestie 💖
  • -u <URL> — use the specified URL to fetch the raw IAB data from instead of the default http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/iab.txt 🌸
  • -v — display verbose progress messages. for the girlies who need to know what's happening at all times 👑

🦋 FILES 🦋

  • ieee-iab.txt — the default output file. that's the one 💅

🌟 EXAMPLES 🌟

$ get-iab -v
Renaming ieee-iab.txt to ieee-iab.txt.bak
Fetching IAB data from http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/iab.txt
Fetched 230786 bytes
Opening output file ieee-iab.txt
1535 IAB entries written to file ieee-iab.txt

look at her go 😭✨

💀 NOTES 💀

get-iab is implemented in Perl, so you need to have the Perl interpreter installed on your system to use it. no Perl, no vibes. that's just the rules 🧚

get-iab 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's also available in source form from CPAN. go get it bestie, we believe in you 🫶

you can use a proxy server by defining the http_proxy environment variable. slay 💜

💖 AUTHOR 💖

Roy Hills <Roy.Hills@nta-monitor.com> — thank you for your service king 👑

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

and that's the whole page bestie!! this one's from March 30, 2007 🎂 — yeah she's vintage but she still ate and left no crumbs. go fetch those IABs, ily, bye!! 💅✨🎀

📦 where this page comes from