Hi,

Is it possible to spoof the mac address of the wifi chipset ?

Thanks

Install wirelesstools, osso-xterm and becomeroot. Look into ifrename command.

I'm interested in this too--I'm kind of hoping that if I change my MAC address to be the same as my laptop that I can use both in a hotel where the wireless seems to work with only one card...)

That said, from the man page for ifrename, it looks like that command is for changing the interface name from eth0 to mywan0 or whatever, not for actually changing tha MAC address.

Is my understanding correct?

I think I remember being able to do this in ifconfig. It looks like something along these lines might work:
The builtin (read: busybox) ifconfig almost certainly doesn't have that command so you might have to get a full copy of ifconfig from somewhere. It looks like there's a net-tools package in one of the repos but when I tried to install it conflicted with just about everything. Maybe unpack it, move the copy that copy of ifconfig to somewhere in /root/ and run it from there? I haven't tested any of it though. so this might not really lead you anywhere. If you do manage to get that going and change the MAC address, test it against your wireless ap/router at home and make sure that it actually sees the changed MAC (ie: get on the router's web interface and do something like "list connected devices" or somesuch).

As for using it to get your laptop and N800 online at hotels:
That seems reasonable, but realize that of course they can't both be sharing the same MAC address at the same time while connected to the same access point.

Good luck!

-John

download the deb unpack it... Take out the tool you need... drop it in bin and make a sim link to /usr/bin

Ok, I gave this a test run and had *some* luck. This of course has only made me more interested in making it work. My notes thus far:
- Unpacked ifconfig to /root/tmp . I could put it in my $PATH somewhere but I didn't want to chance some obscure corner of the Nokia firmware depending on (or working around) some weird behavior of ifconfig. Maybe I'm just paranoid...
- The command I posted above is correct. ifconfig reflects the changed MAC address, and if I run kismet on another computer I can see the N800 probing for a network with the changed MAC address.
- I cannot successfully join a network with the changed MAC address. I don't really know why. :/
- Rebooting the N800 causes the MAC address to revert to the hardware MAC address and I can connect to wireless networks again. whee!

I'll keep working on this.

EDIT: therblack: It strikes me that the path of least resistance for you would probably to change the MAC address on your laptop to match the MAC address of your N800.

EDIT2: Played a little more. I think it might be an issue of the umac.ko kernel module continuing to use the hardware address for some things while using the "spoofed" (changed really) MAC address for others. The umac.ko module appears not to take any paramters when it's being loaded. I'm afraid I'm out of ideas for now. Also, I had no luck trying to pull the same thing with my laptop's wireless card. That thing is just really flakey though. Maybe I'm doing this the wrong way?

-John

snif ...

can't connect to a wifi network once MAC Address has been change...

Here's the brute-force method: Use e.g. two travel routers: Number one connects to the wi-fi network, connect the second to the first one through a short ethernet cable, have it set up as another network (with dhcp et. al.) Now connect your laptop and your N800 to the second network, and use one of them to sign up to the first (external) network..

I haven't tried it, but I ran into the same problem with tmobile in a hotel: Couldn't use both my N800 and the laptop at the same time, having paid the daypass and all. As I already have a travel router set up with my own private wi-fi network, ready to plug in whatever ethernet w/dhcp I can find, it wouldn't be a very long step to add another router pre-set to adapter mode..