[Solved] Has anyone experience of changing the mac address of a Lenny on SD?

[Robin]

I have a number of variants of Lenny on different SD cards, but I have a problem connecting reliably with my router because the "clone devices" all have the same mac address.

Speculation/ Although I would never be able to run two clones at the same time, I suspect the router gets in a state about who has the lease on a given IP address/

I have no area of conflict between router/my pc/skytone, only between clones.

The mac address of the default OS starts 00:21:4D which I have positively ID'd to Skytone.
The mac address of all my Lennys starts 00:ef:a3.

I have not managed to change it persistently with macchanger, and the card that I tried to change by hand stopped working!

[Robin]

I am now guessing that a fake mac address is being set at boot time.
This is beyond my experience - could anyone help with how I could check this?
Cheers

[Mijzelf]

There are several ways to set a MAC address on an embedded Linux device. In most cases it's stored in flash, (nvram or bootenv) and provided to the kernel by the bootloader through the cmdline. Or it's read in userspace by some helper program which sets it.
I suppose that the way the stock kernel extracted it's MAC is not ported to the 2.6 kernel, or the helper program is not running.

You can manually set the MAC address in /etc/network/interfaces, something like

Code: [Select]

# Used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8). See the interfaces(5) manpage or
# /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples for more information.
auto lo eth0

iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet dhcp
        hwaddress ether 00:11:22:33:44:55


[Robin]

Many thanks Mijzelf, solved my problem.