help with mac address

You can not get the MAC adress. The MAC adress for each and every computers network card is only available via special network tools.

IP based polls, on the other hand, is different. I think there are a couple lying around, this one for example: http://www.php-fusion.co.uk/downloads.php?cat_id=28&download_id=361

That one is a bit old, I can not recommend it, but it may work.

Nor can I, since:

It ìs possible to get a client's MAC address in php, but it's not as simple as for ip addresses. However, if the ip address is the same for all clients, they will also share the same MAC address.

From what I know it's not possible to read a client's LAN-adapter's MAC address (being the only one that's unique per client), so you'll have to find another way to differ between users.
Using cookies might be a solution.

@MM: The information you posted contradicts itself. It is true that a LAN adapter's MAC address is unique. But this doesn't mean you will get the same MAC address for any PC behind an IP address. That's because PHP cannot read a MAC address.

PHP is only executed on the web server (outside any local network), which means PHP doesn't interact at all with the client.

The local IP address and MAC address can only be read with a client software. This can be acchieved with a Java applet (not JavaScript) embedded in the web page. But the thing is, any data inside the browser can be faked much easier than an IP address. And students are much more inclined and resourceful to play around with your scripts. So wouldn't it be simpler if you run a member poll?

i cant do with a member poll, becouse website is for a company. Maybe can u ofer some any way for this poll? i cant do with ip and with member :( so what can i do? plz help me :)

You will just have to create the accounts manually, send out logins to the users, and MAKE them vote in a way that is technically possible.

No other solution.

No, it does not; you'll obtain the MAC address of the first node in your path to the client, right? That's a different address than the client's NIC MAC. I know the client's MAC can't be obtained that way.

Also, I do not claim php is able to read it; I'm aware of the OSI model and how it's a technical impossibility as a result of layering. However it is possible to write data that can be accessed by php by running applications in tandem with the server (which, as stated, wouldn't produce usable results) or a client, like you state.

Not that it matters since we agree it's not a viable solution; but I just caught up with this thread not expecting any more replies would have been made. Feel free to let me know if you think I've been misinformed though.

Other than that; using cookies might be the best solution, because students usually have an account of their own to login to any school pc. That means each user has a seperate session, so php-fusion won't read cookies set by previous users.

@mariuse3: A company appreciates trusted results more than random results. But if you want to use a poll that accepts anyone on the internet, try pollcode.com. You will be able to embed their HTML code in a panel and that's it.

@MM: We are talking about a PHPFusion-based poll system capable of working with the client's MAC Addresses. That's not possible unless we rely on client software like Java, that the user must have installed, working and allowed to gather network data in order to be able to vote.

So if you know about OSI and how PHP works, that's great. But talking to any web host administrator to forward low-level networking data to your PHP scripts will results in a failure most of the times.

Cookies can be faked, cleared, or people can simply vote from different browsers if they don't want to get complicated. So as I said, a company prefers data that they can trust, because unverifiable random data is little to no use for them.

Whenever a company needs to create a country-wide or a world-wide poll about some product, they don't publish a poll just for the sake of it, but in order to use the results in their commercial strategy. And this is when you really need reliable results. If some manager wants volumes of votes instead of quality results it can only mean they are doing some brand awareness and they actually don't care about the people opinions but only how many participated.