Mac Geekery

You should not need a patch for wireless. There’s a command line utility that should let you set the MAC address for the airport card located at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport. In fact, this utility will let you perform a number of tasks, including manually scan for wireless networks in a pinch.

While there is no manual page for the utility, you can obtain a listing of arguments with the —help argument and it will happily give you a listing of arguments.

As far as detecting when someone is using a spoofed MAC address, changing the built-in MAC address should set the device into promiscuous mode. Rather than duplicate a lot of effort, I will refer you to the Wikipedia page on the subject.

Note Bene: This utility is present on my iBook G4 with a built-in Airport Extreme card on Mac OS X 10.4. I do not have a machine with an older Airport card (i.e. only 802.11b instead of 802.11b/g). Additionally, this is part of a private framework, which means it may disappear, change location, or be radically changed in future versions of the operating system.

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unxgeek@unxgeek.us
“Smile,” they said, “it could be worse.”
So I did, and it was.