How To Change MAC Address on Ubuntu

In many places or public facilities such as public library, university, airport, restaurant, and even mini market, there might be a free Wifi access so we can connect to the Internet with our laptop. Unfortunately, most of that free stuff comes with limitation for each connection (time limited or bandwidth limited). Once you reached the limit, you'll be disconnected or not be able to use the Internet. There are may workaround to cheat with that, one of them is changing MAC Address.

A Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to network interfaces for communications on the physical network segment. MAC addresses are used for numerous network technologies and most IEEE 802 network technologies, including Ethernet. Logically, MAC addresses are used in the Media Access Control protocol sub-layer of the OSI reference model.

In this post, I'd like to show you how to change the MAC Address and reset it to its original.

Installing the tool
You have to install an application so called macchanger which can be installed from Ubuntu repository:

• sudo apt-get install macchanger

Identifying Wireless Network Device
Please run the following command:

• sudo ifconfig

It will print the available network interfaces on your system. The wireless network interface starts with "wlan" so there should be "wlan0", "wlan1", or "wlan2". In my computer, I have "wlan2" as my wireless network interface.

To change the MAC address of "wlan2", simply run the following command:

• sudo ifconfig wlan2 down
• sudo macchanger -r wlan2
• sudo ifconfig wlan2 up

Now, please disconnect and connect again to the Wifi and you should have a new MAC address on connection details (see the first picture in this post).

To reset the MAC address to its original, run the following command:

• sudo ifconfig wlan2 down
• sudo macchanger -p wlan2
• sudo ifconfig wlan2 up

There are many other options of macchanger command, you can discover it by typing "sudo macchanger --help" or "man macchanger" (without quotes).

Regards :)