ethernet id/mac address on mac os x

[kevinthenerd]

Can I (and how do I) change the ethernet ID / MAC address (00:03:93:XX:XX:XX) on an Apple iBook that's running Mac OS X 10.2.4? Is there any way of spoofing it?

Why do I want to know?

The guys I work with at my university's office of information technology told me I could do what I wanted with this thing, so now we're all curious. I already broke into the root account after they told me I wouldn't be able to (and I told them how to do it), so now we're all curious on how to get in and mess it up more. It's not like I care about the software... all my files are on my Red Hat PC (via sftp), and I'll just re-image this thing if I mess it up too much. I just don't want the hardware to break if that's what it requires.

 

[kevinthenerd]

Also: Is there a way, if I can't, of putting a third-party ethernet interface in it?

 

[glugglug]

It's been 6 or 7 years since I did this (so this was in system 7.5.3), but from what I remember it was pretty easy to find where the ethernet driver code is pulling the MAC address out of ROM (it even had a nice descriptive function name in the ResEdit dissassembler), and on my old mac I changed it to instead always return a static MAC address of F00D 15 22 C00L. Don't have this code with me now, I handed the mac down to my sister.

Should still be possible with OS X, don't know of any 3rd party utils to automate the process.

 

[glugglug]

Looks like there IS a 3rd party tool to do this nowadays, sort of. It doesn't replace the MAC address in every packet, but it allows other low-level networking programs to use whatever address they want without the OS overriding it: etherspoof