Hi everybody,
I work for a company that uses Linux a lot and I am relatively new to Linux. I've been fidgeting with network commands in the terminal and I have come across a problem that some of our locations are having. These locations are using DLink wireless USB adapters and whenever they are having connectivity issues, they keep switching DLinks from machine to machine. Some of the computers have been bound to the MAC address (we do nnot probe and bind MAC addresses anymore), so when the DLinks are switched, when they press "Activate" in the GUI, it says, "Device rausb0 has different MAC address than expected, ignoring."
My question is this...
Is there anyway to clear the MAC address for rausb0? I am aware that I cannot change the MAC of the actual device.
Or is there a way to reset rausb0 settings?
I'd like to be able to do all of this through the terminal rather than the GUI, because of administrative problems at our locations.
The only way I know how to do this is through the GUI, and it is simply taking a check mark off of the box that says "Bind to MAC address".
Thank you!

Here is a bit of an update...
I tried 2 things today.

First, I tried to change the MAC to all 0's by typing
ifconfig rausb0 hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:00
After I did this, I typed ifconfig rausb0 and the HWaddr showed up as "00:00:00:00:00:" but when I typed ifup rausb0, I got the same error about the MAC address.

The second thing I tried was very similar. I tried to change the MAC address to the one that was listed on the back of the DLink by typing....
ifconfig rausb0 hw ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
Where the "x"s are replaced by the corresponding MAC that was on the back of my DLink.
When I typed ifup rausb0, I still got the same error about the wrong MAC being bound.
I went into the GUI and realized that the MAC addressed that was probed in the first place was not replaced when I typed
ifconfig eth0 hw ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
And the MAC that was probed and bound within the GUI, was different than the one shown in ifconfig.

Keep in mind, I probed the incorrect MAC address from a different DLink ON PURPOSE at my desk computer so that I can try to find a fix within the terminal.
I don't want this fixed within the GUI.

Sorry to bump this.
This has just been really driving me nuts.
I know that I probably worded all of this incorrectly.
Sorry about that too, I'm pretty new to using the terminal in Linux for network commands.
Any ideas?

I think you're looking at the wrong end of the problem. You say that the MAC addresses are bound to the individual computers, however I don't think that Linux does that automatically so some bit of software has to be doing this check. You seem to be going about changing the MAC address properly, but something is preventing it from changing, and that something is what you need to identify and disable.

Ya. I agree with that.
This is what happened... If a Linux machine was having issues staying connected to the internet, then sometimes we went into the network configuration in the GUI and probed the MAC of the wireless device and bound it, to see if that would help them stay connected.
So that's how they were bound to the MAC.
We no longer do that because of this issue, but I was just trying to figure out a way to work around this through the shell.

I think this is most likely to be stored in a configuration file somewhere. The usual commands that you use to mess with a card, ifconfig and iwconfig, don't store information permanently anywhere. In fact this often causes trouble for new users who don't understand that you have to issue these commands at every boot.

So that GUI tool is writing stuff in a file somewhere and you'll have to do some digging into what that tool is and where it stores information. Once you've got that, my guess is that you can use any text editor to make the change.