% sudo ifconfig en0 ether aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ffwhere en0 is the network interface (numbered from en0, en1, en2 ...) and aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff is the desired MAC address in hex notation.
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For anyone who has not noticed it ... you are now able to change the system's Ethernet card MAC adress without any third party software. Just do a:
% sudo ifconfig en0 ether aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ffwhere en0 is the network interface (numbered from en0, en1, en2 ...) and aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff is the desired MAC address in hex notation.
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Hint Options
Possible with airport card?
Has anybody tried this with a wireless card? I'd love to be able to do this with my Mac.
Possible with airport card?
I just tried with no luck...the Airport driver probably doesn't support this to prevent MAC address spoofing. Should be possible with a different driver though.
Possible with airport card?
i just noticed my powerbook airport change the MAC addess itself.. i had the MAC hardcoded on my gateway, and after about a month of working flawlessly, all of a sudden it just stopped working - turned out the MAC address had changed!
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Available through the GUI also, not just a command line hint...
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
- Under Jaguar the command does exists, however there is no support built into the kernel.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
It was possible to patch the kernel in jaguar to change the mac address, maybe the same thing is possible under panther so that one can change the aiport mac address.
eh?
So where's the setting for that? I've not seen it in th eGUI at all...
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Please, tell us how to change from GUI
How to change MAC address from GUI
Hi Sorry it took so long to respond.
Wait, My Bad :(
I'm sorry, I just checked again one mu mac here at work and found that you can change the speed and duplex, but the mac address is un-selectable. I saw it there when I was digging arround when I installed Panther but didn't try to edit it... Sorry for the mistake.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
I've tried this back in Jaguar, i saw the option there already but I don't remember it actually doing anything.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Linux and BSD have been able to do this for years. The absence in Darwin was a bit strange. It is nice they implemented this.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
I can't swear it actually worked, but this is documented on the Jaguar man page. I also recall doing this in Solaris 7 -- some five years ago -- so I suspect it has been with us from the beginning of MacOS X.
Not that it isn't useful to be reminded of such things, though... One caveat -- you may have to re-install certain software after doing such a thing. Some licensing activation schemes tie an install to the MAC, and the software will cease working if it thinks it's been copied to a different machine. Unless you know what you're doing, messing with the MAC is generally not advised!
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
In this case, would it not be smart to do this semi-regularly, say at a rate of once a year? It goes without saying that you can change it more often if you're paranoid.. but I think it's just a matter of personal security.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Why would changing a Mac-address once a year be safe?
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Thanks for the heads-up. I wasn't realizing it would revert to its default (apparently hardware-assigned) MAC address after a reboot.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
..and not so much for security, just privacy. I'm sure the logs of where/what we surf/share etc. are based on this number, since it's the easiest to find out over a network and would be least likely to change. Huh? This smells like paranoia to me. If any network activity is logged (web servers, mail servers, etc), the vast majority of those logs are going to be keyed off IP addresses, not MAC addresses. The point of a MAC address is to be a globally unique identifier for a particular piece of network hardware. The point of an IP address is to be a managed, locally unique (as in, no duplication on the network you have direct access to, which might or might not be the public internet) identifier for routing traffic to & from that machine. For TCP/IP traffic -- i.e. the internet, web, email, ssh, ftp, etc -- the IP address can be thought of as roughly the "atomic particle" of address information. On the other hand, the MAC address is like a "subatomic particle" -- it exists at a lower level, it has different properties that don't correlate to those of the level up, and for the most part it's of interest mainly to people in specialized fields. So. Yes, it is possible that your MAC address is being logged somewhere, e.g. at your ISP. But for the most part, the IP address is a much more useful nugget of information. The Apache web server, for example, logs the IP address by default, but I don't even know if it's possible to get Apache to log all MAC addresses -- that piece of information isn't normally available to a web server, unless you're running software that specifically transmit that piece of information to the server for some reason (e.g. iTMS, allegedly). Some people in some specific circumstances might have a legit reason to change their MAC address. From what I've read elsewhere in this discussion, cable modem users can avoid some bureaucratic red tape by this technique. I know that some server machines provide a mechanism for swapping out MAC addresses to assist in network resource management. But for most home users, I just don't see the point -- privacy certainly isn't the best reason to do this, because your IP is still logged all over the place, and it's much easier to track you down with that data than with a MAC address. If that's the only reason you'd want to change your MAC -- don't bother, it's unlikely to change anything at all. ---
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Hi,
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
In this case MAC is shot for Media Access Control (I think) address. So "mac-address" would be incorrect, while MAC address is correct. So as not to confuse the masses, Apple refers to this address as the ethernet address, which is a little confusing considering Airport cards have them.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Not all hardware will allow this, but quite a lot will.
MAC address change dependent on hardware capabilitites
I guess it should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway. This hint only works if your hardware supports it. If you try this on my PowerBook Lombard, for example, you'll get the following helpful message: "ifconfig: ioctl (SIOCAIFADDR): Operation not supported".
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
WHY would one NEED or WANT to change the MAC address anyway??? <(;-0
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
I'm sure there must be some legit reason to need to change your MAC address, but I can't think of one offhand. I can think of a few reasons that aren't legit, however...
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Don't forget, to modify your mac address so you can use your brand new machine on your cable modem without goint through the hassle of informing the ISP of the MAC change...
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Not all MAC addresses are expected to be unique across the world. If the second-lowest bit of the first octet is set, the address is "locally administered" and not assumed to be worldwide-unique.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Let me give a legitimate reason. I have just spent ~40 hours debugging a problem with MAC address allocation in a Fedora Core 5 intel box. Strange behaviour - it could establish a network connection and run services such as ssh, but persistent connections such as http and sftp failed. The _only_ reason I was finally able to narrow it down to MAC addresses was that I found this thread, and discovered how to reset my powerbook's MAC address. I was then able to exactly duplicate the FC5 box's network settings on my PB. Lo and Behold, it _didn't_ have the problem - so that meant it was a problem in the box, not with the setup of the network itself. Shortly afterward, I deduced that it had to be the MAC address itself. Turns out that if you set the MAC address under FC5 in upper case - AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF - it screws up, at least with my driver. If you set it up in lower case - aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff - it works fine. I assume that the driver returns lower case, and some stupid code somewhere is case-sensitive and returns a mismatch if upper case is entered. I doubt I would _ever_ have found this bug, and would have continued to blame the problem on my network managers, if not for this thread.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
If i'm sitting in some random spot with my iBook leeching off god knows whose open Wi-Fi network, I'd rather them not have any unique information about me. Thus it'd be good to be able to periodically change the MAC address, simply to protect my privacy.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Other Machine which is able to change the MAC address:
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
i have tried it with my g4 ibook. the ifconfig command shows the changes of the MAC address but in the gui there is still the old one. as well as i cant connect to the internet.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
nope, it doesn't work with an airport card, at least not with this command under osx 10.3 ...
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
I tried this one. In the Terminal ist was accepted without error message but it didn't change the MAC address. Exchanging "ether" with "lladdr" didn't help either.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
While we're on the topic of different types of NIC's, can anyone tell me what the gif0 and stf0 devices are? I have a G4 1.25gHz PowerBook. There is also the firewire port (fw0), the ethernet port (en0), the airport (en1), and the typical loopback (lo0). I would assume one is bluetooth, but I'm not really sure which one. Looks like from ifconfig, the gif0 supports PTP an multicast. The stf0 doesn't seem to support any protocols from what I can tell.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
You were asking about strange network codes:
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
i'm on 10.3.5 and am trying to do this hack on my old g4. but everytime i try i get a : ifconfig: ioctl (SIOCAIFADDR): permission denied
you must type SUDO
If you don't type the sudo it gives you that. You need to type sudo before it or you will get
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Hi,
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
i can't seem to get this to work, i ran
Somewhat of a workaround
While this is a *nasty* solution to your inability to change your MAC address, it does work. I have found that you can always change the MAC of your internal nic ... but not the MAC of your Airport card. One would think that the hardware doesn't allow it. But ... this is just the OS not wanting to do it.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
Doesn't work in Leopard AFAICT.
10.3: Change Ethernet MAC address from the Terminal
This doesn't work for wired MAC address, under Mac OS X any more. |
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