Changing MAC address in LINUX

Previously I had posted on Changing MAC address in Windows but what if you want to change the MAC address in your LINUX distro. As I've said in the previous post, MAC spoofing can be great for the network with MAC-based restrictions.

There's a utility called ifconfig in LINUX which can be used to view and configure the network interfaces in your LINUX distro. The following shows how you can view your MAC address of the interface and then how you can modify the MAC.

ifconfig -a | grep HWaddr
# This will display the hardware address i.e. MAC of your machine.

Next, enter the following commands in your linux by logging in as the root user.

ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:1E:90:E9:77:D7
ifconfig eth0 up
# This will change the hardware address i.e. MAC of your machine.

Now you can view your changed MAC by again entering the command:

ifconfig -a | grep HWaddr
# This will display the hardware address i.e. MAC of your machine.

This is how you can use ifconfig command to configure MAC for your interface(eth0 in this case). But there exists a tool called GNU MAC Changer which can be used for viewing and manipulating the MAC address of network interfaces. You can download this utility from HERE. This page also lists the proper instructions for using the utility.

I hope you find this post useful.