255.255.255.255
A MAC address is unique to your ethernet card. MAC addresses are used within an Ethernet network to uniquely identify the source and destination of Ethernet frames. ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) is used on IP networks to map IP addresses to MAC addresses within an Ethernet network.
It duplicates the frame to all Ethernet ports, except the port it came from. A switch's MAC table is built not from destination addresses it receives, but by the source MAC addresses. So the frame is broadcast throughout the broadcast domain, until the end device with a matching MAC address responds to the broadcast, thus giving the switch a new source address to add to its MAC table.
The low level addressing scheme used on Ethernet. The 48-bit destination Ethernet address in a packet is compared with the receiving node's Ethernet address.
Ethernet addresses are 48 bits long - not 32 bits long like IP addresses. Different single network standards have different address lengths. Ethernet addresses are called MAC addresses for other reasons, Media Access Control.
Final Destination Address
Generally speaking, routers will unicast-forward incoming packets which have a network broadcast address as destination, unless they are directly connected to that network/subnet and therefore know that the destination address is a broadcast address
The node sends out an ARP request with the destination IP address.
MAC addresses only
When you set up a sub network you decide upon the subnet mask and this determines the network address (all zeros in the subnet portion of the address) and the broadcast address (all ones in the subnet portion of the address). When you assign the host addresses in your subnet, then you use the addresses between the network address and the broadcast address.
Each Ethernet frame sent from one computer to another includes the source and the destionation MAC addresses. It is from these addresses that the switch learns what device is connected to the port. At first, the switch won't know the destination address; in that case, it will broadcast the frame through all of its ports. But soon it learns this information. It is also possible, in some switches, to add the MAC address through configuration commands.
an address that begins with 01-00-5E in hexadecimal
logical addresses only