Setting permanent MAC address in Ubuntu 14.04

Question

Due to the unusual way my ISP set up Internet, I need to manually set up MAC address to go online. So far I've been using:

sudo ifconfig eth0 down
sudo ifconfig eth0 hw ether  xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
sudo ifconfig eth0 up

However, I have to enter this command every time I start my computer. How to set MAC address permanently?

Solution

You can use an udev rule to automatically set the MAC address on your network interface

Create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/99-custom-mac.rules and paste into it:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="net", ATTR{address}=="XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX", RUN+="/sbin/ip link set dev %k address YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY"

where XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX is the original MAC address of your interface (you can get it in the output of ip link) and YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY is the new MAC address you want to enforce.

To make the change effective you can run

sudo udevadm control --reload

but I doubt it works, so a reboot might be necessary.

Comments

[user258821]

I created a .sh file with these scripts in my documents and added it as a startup program in Startup Applications Manager. Didn't help, still had to enter the commands manually in terminal.

[Warren Hill]

how does this make it permanent?