Dells MAC Address Pass-through working on Fedora 41?

Ask Fedora
1

Hello everyone

Does anyone have experience with Dells MAC Address Pass-through on Fedora. I’m running a Fedora/Windows dual boot on my XPS 15. The departments IT guy has set up a wired internet connection for my ASIX dongle using Windows, but didn’t realize that the MAC Address Pass-through was activated in the BIOS, When I use the same dongle in Fedora it only shows the dongles MAC address not the laptops mac address. Has anyone experience on how to get the MAC Address Pass-through working on Fedora systems?

2

Do you know the laptops mac address ( or rather the MAC address that the IT dept expects)?
You can use the random mac address function to assign a specific mac address for each connection. That would be set in the gnome network connection panel.

Note the MAC Address block in the image, and you can set that to match what was expected for your connection. You also need to set an option in the Cloned Address block for this to work.

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image1279×1002 50.2 KB

3

Cool, thanks for your help, I’ll give it a try tomorrow.

4

I tried setting the mac address in the connection panel, with the results that the connection just disappears. It is still listed when using nmcli con show , but trying to connect to it results in the following error message.

> nmcli con up asix-wired
> Error: Connection activation failed: No suitable device found for this connection (device enp0s13f not available because profile is not compatible with device (permanent MAC address doesn't match))

trying to set the mac address via

> ip link set dev enp0s13f address [MAC Adress]

doesn’t work either. It manages to fetch the correct IP4, but still doesn’t connect to the internet. But thanks for your help, it was worth a try.

5

Clear the MAC and specify only the cloned MAC:

nmcli connection modify asix-wired \
    ethernet.mac-address "" \
    ethernet.cloned-mac-address 11:22:33:44:55:66