I have a perl program that needs to get both the current, and permanent MAC addresses of the motherboard ethernet interfaces, when running under windows.

After doing some pretty extensive research into this, I believe this is possible by using communicating directly to the device drivers via NDIS using the following OIDs:
OID_802_3_PERMANENT_ADDRESS
OID_802_3_CURRENT_ADDRESS

see: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb314146.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb314406.aspx

The basic strategy is to use SetupDi to enumerate:

hDeviceInfoSet = SetupDiGetClassDevs(
         &GUID_NDIS_LAN_CLASS,
         NULL, // Define no enumerator (global)
         NULL, // Define no
         (DIGCF_PRESENT | // Only Devices present
         DIGCF_PROFILE  |      // In Current Hardware Profile
         DIGCF_INTERFACEDEVICE) // Function class devices.
         );

Then SetupDiEnumDeviceInterfaces and finally SetupDiGetDeviceInterface
+Detail
on each interface.

Gets kind of messy.

You will finally get the information you need to make the call on
IOCTL_NDIS_QUERY_GLOBAL_STATS to fetch the permanent address.
[download]

I am looking to get access to this information from perl. The closest thing that I've found to date is Win32::NetPacket, however it requires the winpcap Packet Driver API (Packet.dll), whose copyright is not compatible with my use, and there is a bug in WinPcap 3.1 that is fixed in a later version that this module doesn't work with (yet). Also, this is very much overkill for my purposes.

I wonder if there is an easier/better/existing way to do this?

I have no clue on how to figure out if an interface exists on the motherboard or not.

Any help is much appreciated (now that I'm at novice level, I can actually bestow XP points)!

Thanks

-Craig

Update: The solution I went with can be found in my code snippet WIN32: Permanent & Current MAC Addresses. Thanks to all for the great help!