OESF Portables Forum
Everything Else => General Support and Discussion => Zaurus General Forums => Archived Forums => Security and Networking => Topic started by: x273 on August 11, 2004, 10:34:34 am
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anyone knows how change MAC address of a WI-fi card??
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I though MAC addresses were fixed at the time of manufacture, the first couple of digits usually identify the manufacturer.
Mike
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You want to spoof your MAC?
What about using ifconfig like for a standard ethernet card?
Si
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to my knowledge, years ago the mac address was burnt into a PROM so that each card was unique. Now, as far as i understand it's all in software / FLASH. I'm not sure how this works with your WIFI though.
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ifconfig eth0 hw ether 12:34:56:78:9a:bc
eth0 is the interface - you can change most. You might have to do ifconfig eth0 down first, change the address, then bring it up (and re-dhcp etc).
The default MAC is burned into prom. Almost every card has a MAC register that can be used to override the prom address. S/MAC on Windows can do this but Windows and the network drivers are often more limited. The above ifconfig worked on almost every linux system I've tried.
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I think that you will find that most wired Ethernet cards support assigning MAC addresses as it's one of the WHQL (that's M$ stuff if you didn't know or didn't care) requirements that the drivers be able to assign software MAC addresses and most hardware vendors unfortunately have to rely on Windows compatibility to get sales.
I haven't seen the spec for WIFI cards and don't know if they are exempt from this spec on the WHQL tests but it may be the same.
On Linux, however, you are definitely going to be limited by the features offered by the driver which is going to be different for each card.
Good luck anyway.