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?
Your router is using the MAC address to assign a name.
Best I can think of is to set a different Mac address on the machine. I’m not sure if this sticks when you unplug the mic and plug it back in. This effectively changes the MAC address.
https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-change-your-mac-address-in-macos