How to Change MAC Adress?

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vamsiachyuth

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hii all........let me know is there any possiblity to change MAC address of my PC which is windows based pc.......is there any special softwares?....if there or any suggestions plz tell me.........thanks in advance.............if it is possible in LINUX? If so plzz tell me
 
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The MAC address is a hard coded address to identify the machine (or actually the network interface of the machine).

If you have a LAN port and a Wireless connection on your machine, you would have two hard coded MAC addresses.

There is no way (that I know of) to change the MAC address, and I can see reason you would need to other than to try to corner around some kind of obstacle!
 
Some ISPs lock their modems to a certain MAC address so if you change NICs you have to call them up and sometimes wait for them to send a tech out to temporarily unlock it for you.

Anyway, if you are hooking up a router it should have the ability to clone a MAC address, you'll have to look at the manual for specific directions. If you are trying to change your PCs MAC address it will depend on what NIC you use and whether it has driver support for it.
 
vamsiachyuth said:
hii all........let me know is there any possiblity to change MAC address of my PC.......is there any special softwares?....if there or any suggestions plz tell me.........thanks in advance
Click to expand...

Yes, I presume you're using Windows, so you have two options, change the MAC adress in the registry, or the far easier way; get a program to do it for you, and there just so happens to be a program called MadMACs which does just that.
 
There is no way for a consumer to change their MAC address, as it is hard coded into the NIC (as stated earlier). There are ways of spoofing the MAC address so it appears to have a different MAC, but that's a sketchy topic.
 
There are many valid reasons to change your mac. Just like there are valid reasons to clone it in a router.

Often you can just change it in the properties for your netcard. This will override the burned mac address, and will be used each time instead.
 
tyttebøvs said:
There are many valid reasons to change your mac. Just like there are valid reasons to clone it in a router.

Often you can just change it in the properties for your netcard. This will override the burned mac address, and will be used each time instead.
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Which properties are you referring to? You can't do it from the Windows based utility.
 
It is certainly possiable to change the MAC address of a NIC, ethernet or wireless. Google "change mac adress" for more info assuming you aren't trying to change it for some illegal purpose and are doing it purely as an educational thing.
 
[-0MEGA-];1153263 said:
Which properties are you referring to? You can't do it from the Windows based utility.
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Properties for lan adapter > configure adapter > "network address"

But as others as pointed out, this field is not always there and then you have to do it by hand with regedit (or some other type of utility that will do it for you).
 
you can't physically change a mac adress it's saved on the nic on a piece of rom (read only memory). On startup windows (and other os) copy this to their ram and use this to identify themselves on the network. You can use mac spoofers to replace this with another mac adress of your choosing. But you'll have to run that program every time on startup or write some sort of script for it.
 
tyttebøvs said:
There are many valid reasons to change your mac. Just like there are valid reasons to clone it in a router.

Often you can just change it in the properties for your netcard. This will override the burned mac address, and will be used each time instead.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say many valid reasons. I would say there are many many invalid reasons, or malicious reasons and a few very valid reasons.

Care to extrapolate a bit on what you mean?
 
Like so many other things here in life, there are both valid and not so valid reasons to do it. And since it is so easy to do, it is hardly a big secret how to do so.
 
You changed your nic and needs to keep the old address.

Security/penetration testing.

You have multiple nics that needs the same mac for special networking purpose.

Network/system/management troubleshoot.

You sit behind a router and needs to put your computer infront of it.

etc ...
 
tyttebøvs said:
You changed your nic and needs to keep the old address.

Security/penetration testing.

You have multiple nics that needs the same mac for special networking purpose.

Network/system/management troubleshoot.

You sit behind a router and needs to put your computer infront of it.

etc ...
Click to expand...

I agree, port forwarding or any kind of management can be done on the MAC address level and you could clone that one MAC to multiple PCs for management purposes. Personally, I hate dealing with MAC addresses since I have like 6500 clients on my network and don't have time to deal with any kind of management with the MAC address. Things like DMZ and all that other network management stuff can also come into play. However, in a heavily managed environment I would think you would still want individual MAC addresses (if you were going to do any sort of management by MAC) so you can keep track of what machine is doing what.

However, I digress, spoofing or cloning a MAC address, at least in my view, has way many more malicious uses than it does good. Especially towards an average user. Why in the heck would an average user want to do that?

Like many said, it isn't all that hard to do.
 
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