I need to change the MAC Address for Airport on MacBook

Would an easier solution be to provide the school's IT admin with your mac address and have it added? If they can add a block of mac addresses for the usb dongles, they can add more for machines that cannot use the dongle.

Also: "It's hardly a security issue by being able to change your mac address."

While it may not be a security issue for your machine, it is a security for the school network who is using mac address filtering as hopefully only one part of their wireless security.

That being said, have you read this?

http://osxdaily.com/2008/01/17/how-to-spoof-your-mac-address-in-mac-os-x/

1. Open terminal
2 Type sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr 00:00:00:00:00:00 with all the 00 being the mac address you need
3. Confirm change by typing ifconfig en0 | grep ether

en0 = airport
en1 = wired ethernet card but does not seem to work with wired ethernet

Also see:

http://osxdaily.com/2008/01/17/how-to-spoof-your-mac-address-in-mac-os-x/

scroll down to the bottom and read the update.

I have not tried it with wireless but it does work on the Ethernet, just tried it and it obtained a different IP address for the new MAC address. Not much help for you at the moment but the functionality at least for Ethernet is still there, I had to stop and start the connection with sudo ifconfig en0 down then brought it up again.

regards

I don't believe the above works, at least for wireless. I also don't think that en0=wireless. The correct command is: en1=wireless.
This is basically the same routine that worked prior to SL. That's the problem it doesn't work under SL 10.6.

Hi there,

One my unibody MBP, en1 is wireless, so you are correct. A little bit of history.. I can't recall exactly which version update allowed this, but previously, ifconfig could not change the airport MAC address on powerbooks. Perhaps it was 10.4 or 10.5 that allowed this.

I don't have a wireless network handy right now, but I will give this a try later on and see if I can change my wireless MAC address using snowleopard on this MBP.

And you should get vocal with the university. After all you are paying $$$$ in tuition. If IT doesn't help, move up the food chain. Point out how macs are popular on college campuses, etc.

Thanks for the correction. Interesting I can change the wired but not the wireless There is also a utility called changeMac:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33101

that you could try.

micp wrote:
http://download.cnet.com/SpoofMAC/3000-2094_4-80861.html?tag=mncol

The download link no longer works.

I suspect that whomever wrote SpoofMAC no longer wishes to pay for a domain.

I have a original macbook pro with snow leopard 10.6.1 I can set my mac address to what every I want with

sudo ifconfig en1 ether 00:00:00:00:00:00

I have a new 13.3 macbook pro snow leopard 10.6.1 and can not change it anymore.

It would seem it is more of the hardware then the software.

I REALLY HATE THIS!

It does work for me on a pci-slot unibody 15" MBP running 10.6.1 with this command

sudo ifconfig en1 ether 00:15:8b:34:9d:23

en1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet6 fe80::215:8bff:fe34:9d22%en1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
inet 10.0.1.8 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.1.255
ether 00:15:8b:34:9d:22
media: autoselect status: active
supported media: autoselect

en1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet6 fe80::215:8bff:fe34:9d23%en1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
inet 10.0.1.9 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.1.255
ether 00:15:8b:34:9d:23
media: autoselect status: active
supported media: autoselect

The first MAC address is also spoofed.

Yes I was able to connect to a wireless network. I had no ethernet cable plugged in at all. I used the wireless normally with a spoofed MAC address. When you try to change your MAC address, confirm that you are 1) not connected to a wireless network but 2) have the airport turned on. Are you sure that the MAC address you specified was properly formatted (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address )?

From what others have posted, it sounds as if it could perhaps be hardware related, but since I don't know much about that, I'll reserve judgment.

Have you opened up console.app in the utilities folder to see what is recorded in the system log? Also look under "DATABASE SEARCHES" All Messages.

My model number is MacBookPro 5,1

I'm not sure where you are getting the card info in system profiler, though. Under "network":
Card Type: AirPort Extreme (0x14E4, 0x8D)
Firmware Version: Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.10.91.19)

from "ethernet cards", the chipset appears to be pci14e4,432B

Here are some of the relevant log messages (viewable from console) showing me using sudo to elevate my privilege to root and specifying a new MAC address for en1, followed by connecting to a wireless network. (I hid/redacted the MAC address of the router to which I connected)



9/24/09 9:07:28 AM sudo[641] steveo : TTY=ttys000 ; PWD=/Users/steveo ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/sbin/ifconfig en1 ether 00:15:8b:34:9d:23
9/24/09 9:08:13 AM kernel Auth result for: 00:00:00:00:00:00 MAC AUTH succeeded
9/24/09 9:08:13 AM kernel AirPort: Link Up on en1
9/24/09 9:08:13 AM kernel AirPort: RSN handshake complete on en1
9/24/09 9:08:13 AM configd[13] network configuration changed.


Here is the relevant terminal stuff.


steveos-macbook-pro:~ steveo$ sudo ifconfig en1 ether 00:15:8b:34:9d:23
Password:
steveos-macbook-pro:~ steveo$ ifconfig
en1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet6 fe80::215:8bff:fe34:9d23%en1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
inet 10.0.1.9 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.1.255
ether 00:15:8b:34:9d:23