changing the MAC address

Yes all NICs (wired and wireless) have their own MAC address, and No, the MAC address is part of the firmware.

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@pstritt wrote:

I have an Inspiron 8600 with the integrated network card as well as the Pro/Wireless network card.  Do both of these each have their own MAC address?  Is there any way to change or modify one of these MAC addresses?

Thanks

Pat

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Yes the Mac Address can be faked in software. This feature has been avalable since dos and been a protocol.ini parameter and the DOS ODI driver/packet driver (Clarkson aka Crynwr)/NDIS

 

http://www.klcconsulting.net/smac/

SMAC is a Windows MAC Address Modifying Utility for Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003 systems, regardless of whether the manufactures allow this option or not.

In order to change the MAC address in UNIX you need root access to use
ifconfig, in the PC world you need a driver that allows you to select
the MAC address of the card (locally administered addresses) so that
this address is used instead of the one burned on the card. No
"hacked" copy of anything is required for those drivers that
inplement locally administerd addresses. Another method is to have
the source code for the driver (available for all of the Clarkson aka
Crynwr packet drivers) and modify the initialization routine to use a
specific address (your "hacked driver"). Anybody who is even slightly
competent in assembly language could do this without a problem. A
more sophisticated (although easier) approch would be to write a
program to search the entire memory space of the PC to find the six
byte address of the card (find the location of the address in the
drivers data area) and change it while the PC is running (kinda like
doing an ifconfig on a DOS machine!) The explosion of PC based
protocol analyzers is due the implementation, in most driver specs, of
promiscuous mode where the driver passes up all packets regardless of
destination address. Which is really a form of address spoofing.

Some cards based on the Realtek 8139  chipset allow you to write an eeprom on the card to change the mac address in hardware.  The DEC/INTEL 2114X Tulip Chipsets allowed this also.

Intersil Prisim Based wireless 802.11b cards allow this when updating the firmware.