MAC required for connection

[donvon]

I am new to the 770 and to this forum. By way of introduction, I am of ancient age (65) and have much to learn. I use both Mac and Wintel machines. No knowledge of Linux at all (yet). I bought the 770 primarily for e-mail and light surfing while traveling.

Wireless connections at local cafes and on my home network have gone well but the local University Wi-Fi network requires that a new device be initially linked by wired ethernet so that the devices MAC can be recorded. After that, wireless connection to that device is enabled. The University helpdesk is not particularly helpful. They never heard of the 770 and will only say that handhelds are not supported.

Is there a workaround to this or is there a way to connect "wired" so the network can read the MAC of my 770? How do I find the MAC so I can make a plea for them to enable me manually?

[troubleshootr]

I am new to the 770 and to this forum. By way of introduction, I am of ancient age (65) and have much to learn. I use both Mac and Wintel machines. No knowledge of Linux at all (yet). I bought the 770 primarily for e-mail and light surfing while traveling.

Wireless connections at local cafes and on my home network have gone well but the local University Wi-Fi network requires that a new device be initially linked by wired ethernet so that the devices MAC can be recorded. After that, wireless connection to that device is enabled. The University helpdesk is not particularly helpful. They never heard of the 770 and will only say that handhelds are not supported.

Is there a workaround to this or is there a way to connect "wired" so the network can read the MAC of my 770? How do I find the MAC so I can make a plea for them to enable me manually?

The mac address can be found on the sticker behind the battery. If you have Xterm installed, you can also get it by typing the following in Xterm:

/sbin/ifconfig

look for HWaddr after Wlan0.

Hope this helps

[rattis]

Wireless connections at local cafes and on my home network have gone well but the local University Wi-Fi network requires that a new device be initially linked by wired ethernet so that the devices MAC can be recorded. After that, wireless connection to that device is enabled. The University helpdesk is not particularly helpful. They never heard of the 770 and will only say that handhelds are not supported.

Is there a workaround to this or is there a way to connect "wired" so the network can read the MAC of my 770? How do I find the MAC so I can make a plea for them to enable me manually?

How does connecting via a wire, copy you're wireless mac address, what else does it copy?

What happens when you try to connect.

[peramikic]

Use a regular PC like desktop or laptop, spoof the mac address, on windows machines it's a single registry change, register the MAC, and change itback to original.

Here is a good tool for that: SMAC
http://www.klcconsulting.net/smac/

[donvon]

Now that I know the MAC (thanks, troubleshootr), I am going to try to request a manual registration with a personal visit to the computer center. If that doesn't work, I will consider the spoofing with SMAC (thanks, peramikic).

For rattis, what happens is that you can see any page on the University website but as soon as you try to open anything outside, you get a "page unavailable" message. As to your other questions - I don't know.

Thanks for your help,
Donvon