Refresh the OUI vendor registry

The TUI shows manufacturer names next to MACs — Cisco Systems, Inc next to 00:1A:A1:… — when the oui_vendor table is populated. This guide is how to populate it.

TL;DR

make oui-refresh

That’s it. ~5 seconds against IEEE, ~52k rows inserted.

What just happened

The loader pulled three CSVs from IEEE’s Standards Association:

URL	Registry	Size	Bit length	Rows (typical)
`https://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui/oui.csv`	MA-L	~3.8 MB	24-bit	~39k
`https://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui28/mam.csv`	MA-M	~700 KB	28-bit	~6k
`https://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui36/oui36.csv`	MA-S	~650 KB	36-bit	~7k

Each row landed via UPSERT into oui_vendor keyed on (prefix, prefix_length). “Private” allocations (IEEE redacts the company name on customer request) are dropped — Private as a vendor label tells operators nothing the raw hex doesn’t already.

The TUI’s HISTORY and OPS screens will now show the organization name on matching MACs.

Why refresh again?

IEEE updates the registries weekly-ish — new MA-M and MA-S allocations get added all the time. A cron job is reasonable:

# 02:17 UTC every Sunday
17 2 * * 0  cd ~/l2trace && make oui-refresh

The refresh uses UPSERT so concurrent TUI lookups never see a gap. TRUNCATE-then-INSERT would have shown blank vendor labels for the duration of the load.

Lookup precedence

When a MAC matches prefixes in multiple registries (common — MA-M and MA-S are carve-outs of MA-L blocks), the longest prefix wins. A MAC like 70:B3:D5:D7:20:01:

Check	Prefix tested	What’s there
MA-S (36-bit)	`70b3d5d72`	”OnYield Inc Ltd” — specific assignee
MA-M (28-bit)	`70b3d5d`	(none)
MA-L (24-bit)	`70b3d5`	”IEEE Registration Authority” — generic parent

Without longest-wins you’d see every small allocation labelled “IEEE Registration Authority”, which is true-but-useless. The lookup query uses ORDER BY prefix_length DESC LIMIT 1 to pick the most specific match.

Trouble

oui refresh: fetch failed for MA-M (https://...); skipping

Means one of the three CSVs couldn’t be fetched but the others did their work. Common causes: transient network issue, IEEE infra hiccup, firewall blocking standards-oui.ieee.org. Re-run make oui-refresh; it’s safe to do so as many times as you like.