Changing MAC Address Linpus

I need to change my mac address so that i can use my schools wifi. I have an aspire one with the Atheros card. I dont know how to change the address, because this is my first time using any kind of linux. I dont know how to run things in root, and the commands like:

# ifconfig eth0 down
# ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:80:48:BA:d1:20
# ifconfig eth0 up
# ifconfig eth0 |grep HWaddr

That i found dont work. it says permission denied when i try to run them in a terminal. What am i doing wrong?

 

I've never tried to change my mac address, but all you have to do to launch these commands as root, is to put "sudo" before each. For instance: "sudo ifconfig eth0 down"

 

Place 'sudo ' before each command you have listed
# sudo ifconfig eth0 down
# sudo ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:80:48:BA:d1:20
# sudo ifconfig eth0 up
# sudo ifconfig eth0 |grep HWaddr

alternatively to not have to type sudo each time, create a new shell as the root user using

$ sudo su -
then just type each of the commands you had in your post.

On a related note, spoofing MAC addresses is not really a great thing to be doing, have your school network admins asked you to do this? If not they probably won't like you doing it and you could get yourself into some strife.

 

What's the best way to simply check my MAC under Linpus?

 

ifconfig -a

That will give you the MAC address of both eth0 and ath0.
Typical output

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1D:4A:5A:5B:59
inet addr:192.168.1.115 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::21a:4dff:fe53:5b59/64 Scope:Link

plus some other things

The HWaddr is the MAC address.

 

Much appreciated. I assume "ath" is wireless (atheros) and "eth" is ethernet port?

 

That's correct.

 

This appears to be directions for the wired interface. The wifi interface is wlan0. When I try this with the wireless interface, it doesn't work (replacing eth0 with wlan0 throughout). When I use the below quoted commands, it does change the address, but the WIFI quits working. Over on eeeuser, they have a thread that describes exactly how to do this on the EEE PC.

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=80344

In this post they say to do:

#!/bin/bash
wlanconfig ath0 destroy
macchanger -A wifi0
wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode sta
ifconfig ath0 up

However, my AAO doesn't have ath0.

Ok, maybe it does. I'll check.

In any case, any comments on this are welcome.

<EDIT>
I didn't check yet, but I forgot to mention I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 with the shiny new ath5 driver, or whatever.
<end EDIT>

Hans