I have multiple MacBooks. They have built-in wi-fi; however, they require USB Ethernet dongles for wired. The dongles, of course, can be exchanged between computers.

The router identifies the dongles by their MAC address. I’ve currently named each of these Ethernet devices on the router. The computer using a device is now “named” after the device, rather than the computer’s own hostname. To my knowledge, there’s no way to access or change the MAC address within the dongles.

What I’m looking for is a way to identify the computer a dongle is attached to, rather than the dongle itself. Eg, Computer1 shows in the router as Belkin_USBC_0, rather than Computer1.

So far, I’ve named the dongles for what they’re attached to, eg Belkin_USBC_0-Computer1. However, if I move the dongle to Computer2, it’s of course going to keep the same name (-Computer1), so that’s not really helpful. And, again, the dongle is going to receive the assigned IP address based on its own MAC address regardless of which computer it’s connected to. Changing the hostname in the /etc/hosts file won’t be helpful as the assigned IP address will follow the dongle, right?

Is there any way to “skip” the dongle’s MAC address and assign an IP based on the computer the dongle is actually attached to?

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  • AlexisColoun@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I don’t know about macbooks but in most non-apple devices you can configure Mac passthrough in bios, which would overwrite the dongles mac with the mac of the client. Maybe there is an option for that

    • Theory_Playful@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Very interesting… It seems that Dell, HP, and IBM may be the only ones who have implemented this so far; and, at least with Dell, you have to use Dell dongles with a Dell computer for it to work.

      I don’t see Apple implementing this, as they are pushing randomized MAC addresses from a privacy perspective. The idea is that a device’s MAC address can be followed across networks, thereby allowing tracking of an individual associated with the device. (Apparently Edward Snowden identified this as something the NSA does.) MAC address randomization prevents this (at least to a degree - lots of interesting information around this).

      I’m thinking I’m just going to have to label the dongles, use the same ones for the same computers at home, and rotate them when traveling to simulate randomization, lol!