modifying MAC address

Isaac Dunham ibid.ag at gmail.com
Mon Nov 10 18:35:22 UTC 2014


On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 06:52:04PM +0100, Eline Vanrykel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I’m using an android emulator and would like to change it’s MAC 
> address. Busybox is installed and I try to modify it as follows:
> 	adb shell
> 	busybox ip link set dev eth0 addr 00:01:02:03:04:05
> but this always results in the following error message: 
> 	ip: SIOCSIFHWADDR: Device or resource busy
> Okay, let’s solve this by putting the interface down before modification
> 	busybox iplink set eth0 down 
> However, my terminal gets stuck after this command. Killing the process 
> and starting a new shell is also impossible, the shell just doesn’t react 
> anymore. The only way to get access to the shell again is to restart the 
> emulator altogether.
> 
> Does anyone have an idea how to solve this?
> 
> PS: I know that there are several different commands: ip link (with space), 
> iplink (without space) or ifconfig to do the same thing. They all result in 
> the same problem however.

adb works over network connections. If you kill the network connection,
you will not be able to use the shell.

In theory, it *might* be possible to work around this by something like this:

ifconfig eth0 down; ... ; ifconfig eth0 up

(where ... stands for any commands that need to run while eth0 is down.)
You would probably also need to kill adb from another terminal, 
then run adb shell again. 

But really, I'd suggest reading the documentation for your emulator to
see if the emulator allows configuring the MAC address.

HTH,
Isaac Dunham


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