[SOLVED]NetworkManager-1.14.0 keeps changing my MAC address

[Havin_it]

Hi,

This may be a collision of two separate issues. For a while now, my laptop's wifi card (intel 7260 b/g/n/ac using iwlwifi MVM) has tended to drop off my home network periodically, usually after being idle for an hour plus. It also tends to drop off if I move from room to room. In both cases NetworkManager doesn't always detect that the connection has dropped, so I have to disconnect/reconnect to my AP manually. (Sometimes that causes a driver crash and requires a reboot, but that's another story.)

All this I have been quietly living with as a low-priority annoyance. However, I'm now finding that, when reconnecting, NM occasionally gives my card a new MAC address.

Here's a bit of /var/log/messages from a room-to-room dropout and manual reconnection. It shows the MAC being changed twice (neither of the addresses mentioned is the real hw address).

[ct85711]

Well, doing a quick search, it seems since 1.4, this is supposedly a security "feature". As far as it doing anything good, I have no clue. The articles that I looked at, all say about the same thing as far as turning it off.

https://fedoramagazine.org/randomize-mac-address-nm/
https://blogs.gnome.org/thaller/2016/08/26/mac-address-spoofing-in-networkmanager-1-4-0/

[Havin_it]

Thanks

If the change goes that far back then I guess I've had a "stable" spoofed mac all this time (this wifi card was installed aftermarket, a couple of years ago).

What I've been experiencing must be breakage (probably of something lower in the stack) rather than an intentional change, as the behaviour isn't consistent to any of the documented modes of this setting. Sometimes it'll set the true hw mac, sometimes the same spoofed mac as last time, or sometimes a brand-new one.

Anyway, I've dropped in the following conf file which seems to have bullied it into consistency.

[Princess Nell]

https://blogs.gnome.org/thaller/2016/08/26/mac-address-spoofing-in-networkmanager-1-4-0/