Setting a new MAC address to NIC card at bootup.

[SagaciousKJB]

I'm in the process of using my Linux box as a home ethernet router. I need to plug the box directly into the cable modem, but it's giving me some problems with MAC provisioning. The only way I can successfully create a connection is by changing the MAC address to that of my ordinary dlink router, which I don't want to use because it's old and doesn't allow for a lot of rules or a lot of logging.

Anyway, I created an init script that uses various ifconfig commands and lastly the dhclient command to get the information from the cable modem. I was looking at the /etc/network/interfaces man file, and saw the entry for the "dhcp method".

The dhcp Method
This method may be used to obtain an address via DHCP with any of the tools: dhclient, pump, udhcpc, dhcpcd. (They have been listed in their order of precedence.) If
you have a complicated DHCP setup you should note that some of these clients use their own configuration files and do not obtain their configuration information via
ifup.

Options

hostname hostname
Hostname to be requested (pump, dhcpcd, udhcpc)

leasehours leasehours
Preferred lease time in hours (pump)

leasetime leasetime
Preferred lease time in seconds (dhcpcd)

vendor vendor
Vendor class identifier (dhcpcd)

client client
Client identifier (dhcpcd, udhcpc)

hwaddress class address
Hardware Address. class is one of ether, ax25, ARCnet or netrom. address is dependent on this choice

I'm not really sure what values to put in for the rest of the options, of whether I actually need them. Would it be sufficient to simply specify the hwaddress and then specify the device boot with dhcp through some sort of GUI utility like webmin or KDE's system settings? I'm not sure that would be sufficient, because every time that I've attempted to specify Webmin set the device to use dhcp, I then could not specify a MAC address.

I would rather use the interfaces file or maybe a combination of the interfaces file and the dhclient command, but I'm really not clear on what all of those options need.

[gg234]

try this and check if it works

Change your Network card MAC ( Media Access Control) address -- Debian Admin

[SagaciousKJB]

Well, someone in the comments section there answered what I needed to know about the interfaces file, so thanks for the link.