Does the MAC address of a wireless card change?

[GoingUp]

I am attempting to lock down my wireless router. I want to only allow certain MAC addresses to access the router. Does the MAC address of my card ever change?

 

[notfred]

nope, same as a wired NIC.

 

[pulse8]

Originally posted by: Gobadgrs
I am attempting to lock down my wireless router. I want to only allow certain MAC addresses to access the router. Does the MAC address of my card ever change?

I wouldn't think so just because of the nature of MAC addresses as hardware addresses.

 

[GoingUp]

thanks

 

[JOSEPHLB]

MAC addresses never change. MAC addresses are hard-coded into the rom of all network devices; whether its wireless or not. The first set of numbers/letters in the MAC address designate the Vendor ID; the second set of numbers/letters designate a serial number like identification. For example:

AA-BB-00-FE-A0-01

AA-BB-00 would mean it would be a hardware device manufactured by "ABC Company"...
FE-A0-01 would be a serial identification number...

As quoted from a web source:

Ethernet MAC

Ethernet hardware addresses are 48 bits, expressed as 12 hexadecimal digits (0-9, plus A-F, capitalized). They might be written unhyphenated (e.g., 123456789ABC), or with one hyphen (e.g., 123456-789ABC), but should be written hyphenated by octets (e.g., 12:34:56:78:9A:BC). This gives a theoretical 281,474,976,710,656 addresses. This is more than 56,000 MAC addresses for each person on the planet! In practice, the address assignment policy (using flad addressing) will inevitably lead to some wastage - but even so, there are likely to be enougth addresses for ever computer, piece of networking equipment and a large numebr of household/office devices (heating systems, ovens, washing machines, fridges, drinks dispensors, security alarms, video recorders, ...) which could in the future be internet enabled!!!

Source Address Assignment
The 12 hex digits of source address consist of the first/left 6 digits (which should match the vendor of the Ethernet network interface) and the last/right 6 digits which specify the interface serial number for that interface controller vendor (this gives 256 cubed addresses - or 16.78 million separate serial numbers).This allows each vendor to assign their own interface serial numbers (this is a flat addressing scheme), but also allows protocol monitors to examine the first 3 bytes of a frame address to determine the manufacturere of the interface card being used.

The addresses associated with interface cards are source addresses, not multicast nor broadcast, so the second hex digit (reading from the left) will be even, not odd. The following list identifies some of the blocks of assigned vendor MAC addresses (i.e. the first 3 bytes of a MAC source address). As an example, the Ethernet address:

08 00 20 00 70 DF

corresponds to an interface manufactured by Sun Microsystems (see below).

A more complete list follows:


Ethernet MAC