Is it possible to temporarily change the MAC address of the N800 to match the MAC address of my laptop to access a MAC-restricted network? (not using both at the same time, of course)

please see this thread.
this should be removed as a duplicate
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...171#post125171

Thanks. So the answer is, most people don't seem to have got it to work for unknown reasons.

I finally had some time to do a little experimenting with this today, and I think I can now cast some light on the puzzling differences that people are experiencing.

If I do the following:
disconnect wlan
run xterm
sudo gainroot
ifconfig wlan0 down hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:00 (<- any real MAC address)
ifconfig wlan0 up

my MAC address appears to have changed. But as most other people report, if I attempt to reconnect to my router, I can only get "Network connection error".

However I noticed another unsecured wlan nearby, so I tried connecting to that, and guess what? No problem!

So I temporarily disabled security on my own router and tried to connect to it again. Presto, no problem connecting, and the Attached Devices report correctly shows my altered MAC address for the N800.

So the problem appears to be that for some reason the N800 wlan stack is unable to deal with WEP/WPA security after the MAC address is altered. Speculating that there's some wrong information hanging around in memory somewhere, I tried various experiments (like deleting the saved information for my normal connection, booting the N800 in offline mode, then doing the MAC address change and connecting to the router as a completely fresh connection), but no luck.

So, changing MAC address does work partly, but apparently not for my purpose of connecting to the secured network at work.

Could it not be your router saving the MAC address details and stopping you re-connecting?

No, good idea, but I don't think that's it. Even supposing there was some way for the router to confuse a device with a new MAC address with a previous unrelated one, one of the tests I tried was to unplug the router and re-boot it.

Update: I tested again at another location with a different router (Linksys instead of Netgear), also with WPA security, also with another unsecured wlan nearby to test an alternate connection. Exactly the same results.

My suspicion is that it may be something to do with the WPA/PSK key, which I note remains valid for 60 minutes with my router's default setting. I'm just speculating, but it's possible that the N800 is retaining somewhere a key value that it thinks is still valid because it's within the 60-minute window. Of course that key should be discarded if you disconnect and re-connect, and especially if you reboot, but you never know what goes on deep inside code layers and hardware registers that aren't often examined.