Changing your mac address on Linux

Ankur Shrivastava — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:31:16 +0000

I have seen a lot of people saying that “you can never change your mac its in the hardware, you dont have access to it”, but well you can easily change you mac on Linux with a simple command Ifconfig. Which is mainly used to configure the kernel-resident network interfaces and it can help you change your mac first see your current mac type as root
ifconfig
here see your mac address in the following out put
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:2B:B5:43:A5:12 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
where wlan0 is the network interface and ” 00:2B:B5:43:A5:12 ” is your mac address, next you need to bring the network interface down by typing
ifconfig wlan0 down
here replace wlan0 with the network interface you are using, normally it is wlan0 for WiFi and eth0 for Ethernet, now its time to change your mac address, simply type
ifconfig wlan0 hw ether 00:2B:B5:43:A5:3D
here replace 00:2B:B5:43:A5:3D with the mac ID you want to use and then bring the network interface up
ifconfig wlan0 up
now again see the output of ” ifconfig ” to check that now you HWaddr has changed from 00:2B:B5:43:A5:12 to 00:2B:B5:43:A5:3D
enjoy!!!!
PS – MAC = Media Access Control

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Changing your mac address on Linux