How do you change your Airport or Ethernet MAC address in Mac OS X 10.6?

Posted by Dave Gallagher on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Dave Gallagher
Published on 2011-01-12T15:35:10Z Indexed on 2011/01/30 15:27 UTC
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Filed under:

osx-snow-leopard

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macbook

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mac-address

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airport

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ifconfig

I have a MacBook Pro and would like to set a custom MAC address for either my Airport WiFi card, or Ethernet port. In older versions of Mac OS X, you could do it like this:

$ sudo ifconfig en0 ether 00:11:22:33:44:55      // Ethernet
$ sudo ifconfig en1 lladdr AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF     // Airport

For it to work on Airport, you'd have to power it on (e.g. $ sudo ifconfig en1 up), ensure it's not connected to any wireless network, and execute the command. I'm aware such a change won't propagate across reboots.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work on Mac OS X 10.6.6 anymore. Apple appears to have removed the functionality (the command fails silently). Does anyone have any idea how to do it? Thanks for any help you can offer! :)

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