LWN: Comments on "Haller: MAC Address Spoofing in NetworkManager 1.4.0"

Haller: MAC Address Spoofing in NetworkManager 1.4.0

joey — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 13:09:27 +0000

Actually, it has to be overridden on a per-connection-per-device basis, at least for anywhere that device has been used before. Urk.

Haller: MAC Address Spoofing in NetworkManager 1.4.0

joey — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 13:07:02 +0000

I tried following this guide, and the first thing I did was set the global wifi.cloned-mac-address=random. However, that turned out not to cause a random mac to be used. It seems that each of my wifi devices that I'd used with network manager before had its own wifi.cloned-mac-address=permanant setting, so I had to override it on a per-device basis.

Also, there exist some wifi drivers that ignore attempts to change the mac address. Network-manager seems to not show any indication when it fails to randomize it. r8723au is the module I know of with this problem (I earlier fixed macchanger to notice and warn when this happens).

I hope this gets exposed in the nm-applet GUI, because mac randomization should be available to everyone, not only the few people who will read this nice guide and work through the gotchas.

Haller: MAC Address Spoofing in NetworkManager 1.4.0

ovitters — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 13:36:44 +0000

Seems they agree with you! Hopefully this gets into the next stable release.

Btw, gave you some additional permissions on bugzilla.gnome.org. Useful for eh.. triage bugs?

Haller: MAC Address Spoofing in NetworkManager 1.4.0

dkg — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 20:15:06 +0000

I commented on the earlier article about NM's default removal of lower-layer MAC address spoofing (e.g. by udev). I encourage network-manager to switch the default for ethernet.cloned-mac-address back to preserve!