Fedora :: Change Your MAC Address On Boot ?

I have a dual-boot laptop where both are configured as clients for bacula (backup software). Since it is a laptop and it gets used outside the network where the backup is done, I can't just assign a static IP and be done; it really needs to accept an address via DHCP.

Changing the MAC address is easy:

Code:

But if you do this manually, then you'll need to restart your connection. I don't want to do that, I want the laptop to just come up with the correct address in the first place because one day I will forget to change it and the backup system will be very confused (and I will be very sad when I find myself needing that backup).

The solution is to run an init script prior to starting the network. Below is the script I am using, with someone marginal comments. It is based on the network script in /etc/rc.d/init.d, heavily edited. You will need to add one parameter to your ifcfg-ethX configuration file to set the desired MAC address. That parameter MACADDR does not seem to be used by any of the init scripts. You will find it in some of the scripts in network-scripts, but it is not used as an input parameter, but rather set by querying the NIC, thus this use does not conflict.

Here's the script:

Code: