MAC address

[Heiko Wundram]

Am Montag, 20. September 2004 08:51 schrieb Ajay:
> is it possible to change your MAC address from a program?
> Can i do that using Python?

Depends on what OS you're under... Under Linux (and I'd guess that *BSD works 
somewhat similar), you can change the hardware address of some network device 
using:

ifconfig <device> down
ifconfig <device> hw <hw-type> <address>
ifconfig <device> up

So, for example, to change my MAC to some random number (which is invalid, 
because it's a broadcast address):

ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 hw ether fffefdfcfbfa
ifconfig eth0 up

Of course, you need to call all this as root.

From Python, that would be:

import os

def setmac(device,mac):
 os.system("ifconfig %s down" % device)
 os.system("ifconfig %s hw ether %s" % (device,mac))
 os.system("ifconfig %s up" % device)

Under Windows (2000, XP, NT?) there's also the possibility to change the MAC 
of a network device, but I don't know if you can access this OS functionality 
from somewhere else than the dialog box which offers it (maybe you can change 
it somewhere in the registry, don't know).

Heiko.