What is Your Favorite MAC Address Prefix?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

We've all scanned the WiFi AP's around us and marveled at the diversity of hardware in use around our neighborhoods, right?

"Tenda Technology Co., Ltd., Dongguan branch," "NETGEAR," "ARRIS Group, Inc.," "Belkin International Inc.," "Hon Hai Precision Ind. Co., Ltd.," "Actiontec Electronics, Inc."...etc., etc.,

Meh. "Belkin" simply will not do after investing overmuch time fine tuning an awesome OpenWrt powered home network. When someone scans my WiFi AP's, I want a hardware name commensurate with this grand achievement reported back!

So what is your favorite MAC address prefix to set in your wireless configuration file?

config wifi-iface 'default_radio1'
        option macaddr '00:90:A1:xx:xx:xx'

That's right - Flying Pig Systems/High End Systems Inc. - now we're talking!

6 Likes
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Not a fan of breaking standards just for the lulz...

1 Like
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I don't think the term "prefix" is correct. A prefix is something that's added to the beginning, while the manufacturer identifier is an actual part of the MAC address.

Anyway, terminologies aside, I don't comprehemd the topic or find any point of it, let alone something to do with OpenWrt. If I am in a situation where I need to obscure my real MAC address, I would use a random one, or an address of my own making.

1 Like
4

You would be in good company using a random MAC address....Apple, Android, Windows and the linux kernel starting with 3.18 randomize MAC address while scanning for networks to thwart tracking of mobile devices by MAC address. I prefer to have a little fun using OpenWrt to set the first three MAC address bytes. To each his own.

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How about de:ad:be:ef:xx:xx ?

3 Likes
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Or de:ad:fe:ed:xx:xx

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I shamelessly use 00:22:06 which is assigned to a company producing ... things.

3 Likes
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00:20:91 of course
shame this didn't make it
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=146391388912602

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00:23:42 mmmmm...

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b0:0b:13:55:xx:xx

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An amusing historical note is that Microsoft's Hyper-V required linux and XEN users to log in with that at as their guest signature and user ID. They gave it up a decade ago though.

I've added "DE:CA:F1" as my 2.4G suffix, and "CA:FE:01" as my 5G suffix. A bit of an oxymoron-no flying pig worthy of the name could possibly do that on decaf - but there you have it :wink:

1 Like