NOTE: Consider using spoof, a node.js port of this package.
I made this because changing your MAC address in Mac OS X is harder than it should be. The biggest annoyance is that the Wi-Fi card (Airport) needs to be manually disassociated from any connected networks in order for the change to be applied correctly. Doing this manually every time is tedious and lame.
Instead of doing that, just run this Python script and change your MAC address in one command. Now for Windows and Linux, too!
You can install from PyPI using pip
or easy_install
:
pip install SpoofMAC
easy_install SpoofMAC
or clone/download the repository and install with setup.py
. Ex:
git clone git://github.com/feross/SpoofMAC.git
cd SpoofMAC
python setup.py install
If you're not using the system Python (because you use Homebrew, for example), make sure you add '/usr/local/share/python/' (or equivalent) to your path.
Or, consider using spoof, a node.js port of this package.
SpoofMAC installs a command-line script called spoof-mac.py
. You can always
see up-to-date usage instructions by typing spoof-mac.py --help
.
Some short usage examples.
spoof-mac.py list
- "Ethernet" on device "en0" with MAC address 70:56:51:BE:B3:00
- "Wi-Fi" on device "en1" with MAC address 70:56:51:BE:B3:01 currently set to 70:56:51:BE:B3:02
- "Bluetooth PAN" on device "en1"
spoof-mac.py list --wifi
- "Wi-Fi" on device "en0" with MAC address 70:56:51:BE:B3:6F
You can use the hardware port name, such as:
spoof-mac.py randomize wi-fi
or the device name, such as:
spoof-mac.py randomize en0
spoof-mac.py set 00:00:00:00:00:00 en0
While not always possible (because the original physical MAC isn't
available), you can try setting the MAC address of a device back
to its burned-in address using reset
:
spoof-mac.py reset wi-fi
(older versions of OS X may call it "airport" instead of "wi-fi")
Another option to reset your MAC address is to simply restart your computer. OS X doesn't store changes to your MAC address between restarts. If you want to make change your MAC address and have it persist between restarts, read the next section.
OS X doesn't let you permanently change your MAC address. Every time you restart your computer, your address gets reset back to whatever it was before. Fortunately, SpoofMAC can easily be set to run at startup time so your computer will always have the MAC address you want.
First, make sure SpoofMAC is installed. Then, run the following commands in Terminal:
# Download the startup file for launchd
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/feross/SpoofMAC/master/misc/local.macspoof.plist > local.macspoof.plist
# Customize location of `spoof-mac.py` to match your system
cat local.macspoof.plist | sed "s|/usr/local/bin/spoof-mac.py|`which spoof-mac.py`|" | tee local.macspoof.plist
# Copy file to the OS X launchd folder
sudo cp local.macspoof.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons
# Set file permissions
cd /Library/LaunchDaemons
sudo chown root:wheel local.macspoof.plist
sudo chmod 0644 local.macspoof.plist
By default, the above will randomize your MAC address on computer startup. You can change the command that gets run at startup by editing the local.macspoof.plist
file.
sudo vim /Library/LaunchDaemons/local.macspoof.plist
- 2.1.1 - Use
ip
command when available, in more situations - 2.1.0 - Use
ip
command when available;ifconfig
is deprecated on Arch Linux - 2.0.6 - Increase MAC address randomness
- 2.0.5 - Allow 2nd character in MAC address to be a letter
- 2.0.4 - Warn when trying to use a multicast address
- 2.0.3 - More Python 2.7 compatibility fixes
- 2.0.2 - Python 2.7 compatibility fixes
- 2.0.0 - Python 3 support
- 1.2.2 - Fix for Ubuntu 14.04
- 1.2.1 - Fix line endings (dos2unix)
- 1.2.0 - Add Windows and Linux support (thanks CJ!)
- 1.1.1 - Fix "ValueError: too many values to unpack" error
- 1.1.0 - Fix regression: List command now shows current MAC address
- 1.0.0 - Complete rewrite to conform to PEP8 (thanks Tyler!)
- 0.0.0 - Original version (by Feross)
- Feross Aboukhadijeh [http://feross.org]
- Tyler Kennedy [http://www.tkte.ch]
- CJ Barker [[email protected]]
Improvements welcome! (please add yourself to the list)
- spoof - node.js
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