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Raspberry Pi – How to spoof MAC address

April 2, 2016 by Pat 7 Comments

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raspberry pi spoof mac addressI’ve tried a lot of Raspberry Pi projects and the only one I’ve stuck with is tracking airplanes using ADSB and feeding that data to FlightAware using their PiAware system. The PiAware image for the Pi uses the eth0 MAC address to create a unique ID for the feeder you’re running. The downside with doing this is that if your Raspberry Pi breaks, dies, or if you upgrade to a new one like the Raspberry Pi 3, then PiAware will create a whole new feeder site. So much for your awesome feeder streak!

The solution is to spoof your eth0 MAC address on the new Raspberry Pi! I’ve done this method with 3 Raspberry Pi upgrades for PiAware and have a 580+ day streak going (at time of writing)!

This method is tested and working on the Raspberry Pi 3! I recently upgraded my Raspberry Pi B+ feeder to a Raspberry Pi 3 and this works great!

All you have to do is get the MAC address from your old Pi’s eth0. Just run ifconfig eth0 then write down the hardware address.

Then on the new Raspberry Pi, don’t connect to the internet yet! Add this line of code below to /boot/cmdline.txt. This way you can change the MAC before PiAware makes it’s initial connection, preventing a new site from being created.


smsc95xx.macaddr=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

Add that line to the end of the existing line within /boot/cmdline.txt and replace the xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx with the eth0 MAC from your old Pi.

Reboot your Pi, log back in and run ifconfig eth0. Your MAC address should show the spoofed address! Connect to the internet and start feeding ADSB data to FlightAware keeping that well deserved streak alive!

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About Pat

I'm a sysadmin, WordPress Core Contributor, plugin & theme developer. I've also developed a few non-WordPress websites. I'm a technologist at heart. I enjoy tinkering on many projects. Here on my site you will find some of the projects I've worked on. Whether it's the WordPress plugins I've made, some WordPress tips, various tech tips, or even a couple Halloween props.

View all posts by Pat

Comments

  1. samiamuc says

    January 24, 2017 at 4:57 pm

    Thanks! Could you add photos/screenshots as well?

    Reply
  2. engineer says

    April 10, 2017 at 6:50 am

    Could i use that to make a place holder for my operator provided DHCP ip address while my main machine isn´t connected to the wire?

    Reply
    • Pat says

      April 10, 2017 at 7:43 pm

      I’ve never tried it, but it might just work

  3. harold says

    May 30, 2017 at 8:54 am

    What about spoofing the wlan0 of a Pi3 ?

    Reply
  4. fred4fish says

    June 11, 2017 at 8:58 pm

    Same question I have. Your solution worked well for PiAware on eth0 but can not find a way to fix wlan0. Any suggestions?

    Reply
  5. EnthuMan says

    October 27, 2017 at 12:03 am

    Great, this works much simpler that macchanger. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Setting up Pi-hole: Step-by-Step Instructions – 1ntel Network says:
    February 4, 2019 at 8:41 am

    […] several clever individuals who had either purchased an RPi serial cable, or made their own, or had modified their RPi’s MAC address to make it easy to find using an ARP command. If you are not that advanced, try one of the […]

    Reply

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