How do I change MAC address on wireless card?

[SlickWilly440]

Hello,

Before I tell you my problem I am obtaining Internet access with a wireless Belkin PCI card through WEP at an apartment complex (I didn't need to give the place my mac address or anything, I just had to log in with the Network Key). Any how a few days ago I couldn't access the internet. The network icon said I was connected to the network but everytime I click internet explorer and tried to access a website, the browser just linger there and gave me the no server thing error (The packets were transfering really slowly). So I called the maintainence guy on the phone and he said that the wireless internet was not down. That is when I thought I got kick, so I tried a different wireless card and that solved my problem.

Do you know how I can get back online with the wireless card that does not let me access the net (on the network I am currently using)? Is there a way I could change the mac address or hide it, so it cannot be visible? What can I do to prevent this problem from occuring again? If I use a proxy server or something will this help me prevent the problem from reoccuring?

Thank You!

[SlickWilly440]

If I powercycled the MAC Address using MacMakup, would this solve my problem to get the wireless network card to connect to the network again?

[naira]

Im not sure if it is allowed to changed the MAC address because that MAC address is actually based from standards and that is unique. If there is a way to really change that I believe that it is illegal since it would have a conflict on another device on the web and it will have problems with licensing. With regards to the particular card that wont give you internet connection, it might be that the card only needs driver update.

[ErikD]

What is powercycling a MAC address? I wouldn't mess with that. And as mentioned it is very important that MACs be unique, ie there is only one of each in the whole entire world.

So if you have a second wireless card and it is in and working why bother? If the network doesn't do MAC filtering anyway I doubt changing the MAC address would help. It is more likely a bad card, going bad, needs proper drivers, or is out of range of the signal.

[TonyT]

AFAIK the mac address of a net device is burned into a ROM chip on the device and cannot be changed. Every manufactured NIC or wireless card, and every router has its own unique mac address.

[ps228]

If this were a commercial network, and your adapter worked on other wireless LANs, it might be possible that an attacker was trying to hijack your connection or set up a man-in-the-middle attack. Any MAC address can be spoofed, which is why security communication protocols with channel and packet encryption are used. MAC addresses were never designed to be used as a security mechanism.

MAC address filtering isn't typically used, because unlike wired ethernet cards, nearly all 802.11 cards in use permit their MAC addresses to be "altered", often with full support and drivers from the manufacturer. These MAC changer utilities bypass the hard-coded MAC address, and stores the modified value in the registry. If you don't know where the value is stored, it can be difficult to reverse this action.

Since this is an apartment WLAN it's most likely that your 802.11 adapter has failed or has had its config trashed. Software is less reliable than hardware, so with the card in place, I'd start with uninstalling the adapter using the Device Manager or its equivalent in your OS, shut down the PC, remove the card, start up the PC and go through installing the card again from scratch.

[ps228]

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