Check host availability by MAC address

Question

Is it possible to check if host with secific MAC address are 'alive' ?

I do NOT want to use 3-rd layer ISO/OSI and ICMP ping message

Answer 1

You can do an ARP Ping. This only works when you are physically on the same network segment. Read more about this on Wikipedia's ARP Ping article.

Note that there are two different implementations of arping, one which can ping MAC addresses to resolve them to IP addresses and one that doesn't. The implementation in the iproute2 package does not do what you want, but Thomas Habets implementatation does. This is also explained in the Wikipedia ARP Ping article