How do I set the MAC address for eth0?

English Network/Internet
1

I’m build a Firewall using OpenSuse 11.1 and I’m using three NIC cards I want to make the on board NIC eth0, how who I set the MAC address for eth0? I thought I could make this change in YAST but I’m just not seeing it?

Thanks for any help you can give

2

Hi,
To change eth0 MAC address do the following.
ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 hw ether xx.xx.xx.xx.xx.xx (6 bytes MAC address u want to change to)
ifconfig eth0 up
Your ethernet MAC address will be changed.
I am not sure if it works on Open Suse 11.1. but it works on Open Suse 10.2. try out & let me know.

BR,
Sagar Kadam

3

@kadamsagar123, it works on all Linux distros, it’s an ifconfig feature.

@OP, You don’t need to muck around with MAC addresses to make a particular NIC eth0. Under YaST if you dig around the Network Device menus, there is a box to change the name assigned to the interface by udev.

4

Thank you both for your help, I didn’t know that ifconfig had other features, you learn something new every day.

5

ferrisdigital wrote:
> Thank you both for your help, I didn’t know that ifconfig had
> other features, you learn something new every day.

man ifconfig

6

You might know this already, but there are GNU distros just for that purpose – firewalls. Check out monowall, smoothwall, ipcop, and devil linux, just to name a few. They have a minimum amount of processes running, which means fewer attack vectors and greater security.