[geeks] Macintosh computers and MAC address blocking

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

A friend of a friend of mine with a little too much time on their hands
found out that their WiFi router had a built in MAC block.

He told her that meant the router would not work with a Macintosh computer,
and she should get rid of her brand new MacBook if she wanted to bring it
here and use public WiFi or Internet cafes.

I calmed her down and explained that the MAC was in effect a serial number
of the wireless card or the computer, but with the right software you
could spoof a MAC so no one used it anymore.

This leads me to a question. if someone actually uses MAC blocking,
can they specify a wild card? Does Apple use a specific range of MAC
addresses, or do their WiFi cards use MAC addresses assigned by the
makers of the cards? 

I know it's more complicated because the original Airport card was a 
(slightly) modified Orinoco card, to the point that you if you
could put an Orinoco card in the Airport slot it would work and
the Airport Extreme is a Broadcom card/chipset.

I had an iMac with an Airport adapter, but no card. I took the plastic
cover over the antenna off of a Cabletron Orinoco clone (which was not
recognized by the Airport software in a laptop), stuffed it into the
adapter, connected up the internal antenna and it worked on OSX 10.3.

I also opened up a Airport base station (the original with a modem and
one Ethernet port) and removed the Orinoco card in it. I needed the
base station later and put another Cabletron clone in it. It works
fine.

So if you are still reading this, can one use the MAC address block
to (theoretically) block Macintosh computers?

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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