Support for changing hw MAC address of network device is needed in nm-connection-editor

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas]

Lots of users needs to change hw MAC address on network devices these days, because some internet providers "locks" internet access to specific hw MAC address.
Currently NetworkManager doesn't have an ability to change hw MAC address of network device :(

So, please add an ability to change hw MAC address of network device in nm-connection-editor

This is already requested at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=553771

There is also info how to change mac in terminal:

ip link set eth0 address <mac>

another way is to user macchanger or macchanger-gtk tool.

[memeyou (memeyou)]

it annoyed me to find out the whole reason my wifi card wasn't working was that networkmanager breaks when u enter a mac address in the field. doesn't care if i change it in hal preferences, too.

[sam tygier (samtygier)]

i have 2 cases where this would be useful.
1) a laptop whose MAC address got corrupted after waking from sleep on a network that was locked to registered MAC address. After sleeping it would not connected until rebooted (which restored the real MAC address)
2) on a network where the dhcp server gives you the same IP address that you had last time, by remebering your MAC address. but one particular IP address is broken (possibly a machine on the network is convinced that it should have it). I get stuck because the DHCP server keeps giving the bad IP address.

[memeyou (memeyou)]

Not that we need reasons - it's broke should be enough. I just don't like going on to public networks with personally identifiable information and having my usage tracked and privacy violated (remember the pentium 3?). It also yields to hackers as a source of information/fingerprinting of potential victims by helping them determine the make and model of their hardware.

[Mathew Hennessy (ubuntu-unixslave)]

This is annoying. I want to be able to modify my wlan0's MAC via NetworkManager (edit connections) so that I can attach to attwifi with my iPhone, then put it in Airplane mode, and enable the manually-configured connection for attwifi that has my iPhone's MAC on it.

Does wicd support this? I'll keep looking at wicd..

[Mathew Hennessy (ubuntu-unixslave)]

wicd supports this by letting you attach a shell script to connection build/teardown, but apparently attwifi is a bit cleverer than just using MACs and the iPhone browser useragent :p

Though wicd ends up being kind of ugly in netbook remix, and it's a bit slooow, it does have this functionality, and NetworkManager is fail.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

A fix for this is available out of the box in Maverick, afaik (it includes the commits that fix this according to upstream bug reports).