I've an old computer which I decided to turn into a wireless router. It has only a floppy and a hard disk, so my only choice to boot LINUX (Debian) are 3 diskettes and installing the rest of the system via internet. Unfortunately I realised, that my internet cable provider filters on MAC. So I decided to change the MAC of the old comp with the one taken from my laptop NIC. No success using ifconfig:

ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:00

I tried different syntax too and I also tried bringing the eth0 interface down, changing the MAC, the eth0 up - again on success (No errors either!)

I've read that drivers of some NICs do not allow MAC change. And it seems that the model I have is such a one :| - SMC8013 (or WD8013).

I've been looking for some info with google and I found none :|
My question is: Is there another way of chaning the MAC of my NIC? Else I should get a new NIC and try again. Or I should call my internet provider telling him my new MAC address.


Thanx

Yes to all 3 questions!

All 3 would work well enough.
Telling your ISP seems the easiest and cheapest tho'..

If you want to change the MAC address of the card, you may need to find a better driver.
What is the card's id number from lspci -n?
The Google that number & "driver" and see if there are other choices.

Many thanks for your answer!

After playing enough with my lan card I called my ISP and in a few minutes I got connected via my new MAC. I mean connected my laptop, changed its MAC address and there were no problems using the net. Unfortunately my other comp was still not able to find the net

There is something I didn't mention - my NIC is ISA! So lspci won't help me with info. I tried isapnp - no such command. There was no pnpdump either. (Debian booted from 3 diskettes).
It seems that the driver is the correct one. I found a number written on my card and searching the net I found that my card is smc8013 (wd8013) and it works quite well with the driver I choose.
I begin thinking that either my NIC does not function properly or I don't use the right settings for it.
I've read many articles over the net about this NIC. One of them said in the process of booting the IRQ/memory/I/O were not correctly bound the the NIC and that in this case I should give them as parameters at the boot prompt. I did so, but again no success

After such a long battle with this NIC I find a good idea buying another NIC :|
But still if someone advises me about how to make the appropriate settings of my smc8013 lan card I'll definitely give it another try


Thanx

In Linux, struct net_device is the structure used to keep track of network devices ( virtual/real).It has a field "char dev_addr[MAX_ADDRLEN]"
where the mac is stored and is checked in ip_rcv function in the network stack.

You could change this by this piece of code in a kernel module and achieve this.

spin_lock_irqsave(&lock,flags);
dev->flags|=IFF_PROMISC;
memcpy(dev->dev_addr,s.sa_data,6);
memcpy(dev->perm_addr,s.sa_data,6);
spin_unlock_irqrestore(&lock,flags);