How to Disable MAC Randomisation on Fedora Workstation 40?

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1

Hey there since Fedora 40 WiFi MAC Randomization is enabled by default, how do i disable wifi mac randomization and set the wifi to use physical mac address of the laptop as i am going to enable wifi mac filtering , here are some screenshot of wifi setting, which ones to select under Cloned Address

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what is BSSID for ? i assume its the mac address for the laptop

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and in under MAC Address drop down menu ? this i guess is the mac address for the Wifi Router which i guessed by going into the status page of my wifi homepage and there it was this same address under the WAN option

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so the only thing confuses me is the Cloned Address to which to select .
here are my system settings if relevant

System Details Report

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  • Date generated: 2024-06-01 18:53:48

Hardware Information:

  • Hardware Model: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. Vivobook_ASUSLaptop X1502ZA_X1502ZA
  • Memory: 16.0 GiB
  • Processor: 12th Gen Intel® Core™ i3-1220P Ă— 12
  • Graphics: Intel® Graphics (ADL GT2)
  • Disk Capacity: (null)

Software Information:

  • Firmware Version: X1502ZA.315
  • OS Name: Fedora Linux 40 (Workstation Edition)
  • OS Build: (null)
  • OS Type: 64-bit
  • GNOME Version: 46
  • Windowing System: Wayland
  • Kernel Version: Linux 6.8.11-300.fc40.x86_64

WiFi Hardware Information:

  • Hardware Model: D-Link DIR-819
2

what you need to do is described in here F40 Change Proposal: Wifi MAC Randomization (System Wide)

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3

Some (most) access points advertise their SSID and are easy to find and access by simply scanning.

However, some may be configured to be hidden and not advertise their name for security reasons. The actual SSID for those would be entered in the BSSID block in order to connect and the SSID block would be empty. The user must know the actual BSSID and enter it before connection is possible.

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4

from the post what i get is “networks with access control based on MAC addresses will need to explicitly set wifi.cloned-mac-address to “preserve” in network profiles to avoid any disruptions in connectivity” so i have to set it to Preserve . That worked as i check on my dual boot secondary install of win11 and can verify in router status page there was same mac address on both OS(Fedora & win11)

5

i was able to disable mac randomisation, on last thing in my wifi status page when i connect a device there it show its MAC Address, IP Address and Device Name. In device name i see my smartphone’s name under Device Name but for fedora i see the device name as Unknown, is there any setting in fedora to change so as to get Fedora in wifi device name

6

You are asking a new question, start a new topic please.

7

my bad :sweat_smile:

8

When this change happened on my network (that is entirely wifi) it seems every device was assigned a new MAC address which broke the network since I had the dhcp server configured with reserved IPs for the hardware MACs but the machines changed the mac as soon as they were rebooted and thus received a new IP.

My fix was, for each affected machine, to look at the router/dhcp reservation entries and reset the actual mac address in that cloned address field you showed to display the actual hardware mac that was in the dhcp server reservation list. That restored the appropriate IP to each system and things worked.

This was my fix and is not necessarily correct for everyone, but since my network relies on each server at a fixed address it was required for my systems.

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