mac address

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi all,

I decided today to find out the MAC address of my primary nic. To my surprise, ifconfig reports a different hwaddr from that reported by arp. 

The hwadr is supposed to be the MAC address, right? Why are ifconfig and arp reporting different hardware addresses? How do I find out my nic's real mac address? 

I've looked at the networking howto and at the networking overview howto, but didn't find anything about this there. If someone could please explain this, I would appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
Greg