MAC address changer..

techguy

Hi Guys,
I just came accross a program there called a-mac. Its a utility for changing the MAC address of your computer. I was just wondering that if someone was to change their mac address can the admins know also can they tell what terminal the computer is plugged into when onto the network. i.e where exactly the ethernet socket is.? This is just out of curiosity now.

Hakko

rob1891

Yep, they can do all of the above. Question is, are they bothered!

Switches can log the mac address connected to each of their ports, ports can be mapped out to wall sockets in rooms. A router, or dedicated machine could be monitoring traffic and flagging prohibited/excessive usage (google a program called snort). With the IP address they can look up your MAC on the gateway machine to your subnet, or probably directly on the switches. So in short, _if_ they had all the management software in place there could be a little blinking red light over your desk the moment you click that midget porn torrent.

But it's a big _if_. More likely they'd have to sift through logs or trace you as you are misbehaving and all that effort is far less attractive than hiding in the server room and watching the latest family guy, just downloaded from the same torrent site!

Not worth risking a job over though.

techguy

It is a college network. an I am in a student appartment complex. I'd say they have the ports on the switch mapped to the rooms.

Capt'n Midnight

Managed switches can give reports of MACS on a per port basis.
3com sitches have a security option on the ports. It will imprint onto the first MAC the port sees and then reject all others.
3com network supervisor transend is a free app that can do this for ancient 10Mb switches. Fire it up and you can have an excel file with macs per port per device etc.

Otherwise
If they have a firewall on the same subnet then it can filter by MAC.

If they do a network scan then they can pick up the MACs

If they were clued in then they could filter by brand name (first 6 digits) to see if any odd ones, the second block of 6 digits can contain reserved addresses too, so clueless spoffing could easily be picked up.

I reckon they don't care, unless the IP you are using starts ringing alarm bells for some other reason. They could trace to port fairly easily. If they then found you were faking your MAC they they would probably treat what you did as being deliberate and pre-meditated.

quazzy

I suppose this program could be used to access a WLAN with MAC Address Filtering enabled.

Can't see any other benefits really