Hey all,

I am a Mac guy but own a Thinkpad T22 and I've really wanted to put linux on it -- I did it yesterday by installing mandrake 10.1.... also Ubuntu... but thats a different story... anyways I have a question I'd love to get an answer to...

First of all, I'm in a college university network. Right when you get here, you are told to register your computer with the campus. They get your MAC addy here, and I assume the way they do it, is that if the MAC addy is on their list of regged users, they can browse and use the internet. If it's not, you go right back to the registration page. Each user is allowed only one MAC addy to their name.

So here is my setup. My iMac and Thinkpad (when it ran winXP) were using the same MAC address, the Windows lappy was spoofing the iMacs. That was all I changed and things worked perfectly.

Now here is the problem. I change my laptop's MAC address to that of the iMac, make it active... and I get the registration page. I have the same MAC address, but I still get the reg page. Also if I go through it, it claims at the end 'hardware already registered'.

Thinking this was just a problem with Mandrake I tried Ubuntu as well, and got the same exact problem.

I don't work for the campus, but maybe there are people out there that could possibly help me? The main reason I have this laptop is just for internet and I'd love to get it working. Are there any other numbers that I could change that could influence this and make it work?

Thanks in advance,

Ken

is it an option to use the apple as internet gateway? Or to buy a router?

Just some suggestions

Hrmm...

The iMac only has a single ethernet port, so I wouldn't really know how to go upon using that as a gateway, besides getting a wireless internet card.

But in other news, I do have a router-- a US Robotics 8054, which is currently setup as an access point (if I set up DHCP my internet port will get shut down, they really hate DHCP servers). I'm sorry I'm so clueless, normally I know what i'm doing, but for some reason I just feel lost.

Thanks in advance.

Just curious if it matters if the MAC address is in uppercase or lowercase, if it does matter then this would be the problem.

Anyways I run ifconfig on my iMac and get this:

en0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ether 00:0d:93:5c:fb:1c
media: autoselect (none) status: inactive

On my linux laptop I get the hddwr ID for eth0 to be

eth0: 00:0D:93:5C:FB:1C

... are these different MAC addresses that don't show up the same to the people that I registered with?

Also, my router is setup in AP Only mode, which means there is nothing in the WAN port (which I think I need to use to do MAC address cloning).

***sigh***

Thanks in advance.

Linux will automatically change the mac address to all caps, so you'd have to try and change it on the Mac if you thought it was a problem.

I'm about to try the same thing at UTD, we'll see what happens...

Thanks for the replies, turns out it was just a simple line of text to put in

/etc/network/interfaces

Thanks!