Damn Small Linux - Not!

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

Has anyone had any luck in changing the mac address of a wireless device?

I have a Linksys WUSB54Gv1 usb wireless device. Using the ndiswrapper script it works great.

This is what I try:

#ifconfig wlan0 down
#ifconfig wlan0 hw ether <withheld, but valid>
#ifconfig wlan0 up

After this, "ifconfig wlan0" and "iwconfig wlan0" looks just fine. I have my access point, my ip address, etc.

But my router doesn't return my pings. After 10-20 pings or so, i get 100% packet loss. Also, when I try "#route" command, it displays the usual first line, "Dest: 192.168.1.0 Gateway: * Genmask: 255.255.255.0 etc etc", and then it appears to hang. I've discovered, by accident, that if I give the command a min or so, it completes, with my usual second line, route to my gateway. When I run the command again, same thing happens.

I have also tried setting up a different mac address before setting up my wireless device, between "modprobe ndiswrapper" and "pump -i wlan0"

Is there something I am missing? Has anyone gotten mac address spoofing to work in DSL or DSL-n?

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

Anybody? This issue is still unresolved for me.

Winter Knight · Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 65

Resolved, finally!!!

It turns out that the ndiswrapper website has more than one set of instructions regarding this. The command:

[code:1]ifconfig wlan0 ether hw <address>[/code:1]
does not work with ndiswrapper. At least, I couldn't get it to work with ndiswrapper under RC1 or RC2.

This is what I do:

[code:1]ndiswrapper -i wusb54g.inf
cp 5041:2234.F.conf /etc/ndiswrapper/wusb54g
modprobe ndiswrapper
...[/code:1]

My custom 5041:2234.F.conf file is just like the original, but the line that said:

[code:1]mac_address|XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX[/code:1]
now says:
[code:1]mac_address|00:00:6C:00:00:00[/code:1]

The original really has x's, they mean use whatever the card says it should. I used one that starts with 00:00:6C, which is the first private OUI company ID. There are several others.

Basically, you change /etc/ndiswrapper/<driver>/file.conf to include the MAC address that you want, and you do this after loading the Windows driver into ndiswrapper, and before loading the ndiswrapper module into the kernel.

Hope that helps someone. It sure would have helped me if someone else had pointed this out last month, or yesterday.