In order to connect your laptop to the Mathematics Department's network via dhcp it is necessary for you to provide us with your hardware address. This is a number of the form 00:04:25:0a:1d:2f which is in principle unique to each network card. Under Linux or MacOS X open a terminal window and type:

      ifconfig -a

and then look for the number after HWaddr or ether, respectively for the appropriate interface (usually eth0, the non-wireless ethernet interface on your machine). Under Windows you can open an MS-DOS window and run:

      ipconfig /all

The hardware address is listed after Physical Address and the number pairs are separated by hyphens, not colons.

For more detailed information on how to obtain the hardware address you can consult an excellent reference from the University of Minnesota computing services:

Finding the Hardware Address for DHCP