Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

johnnyham

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 18, 2010
116
0
I'm staying at a hotel for the next two weeks that uses a MAC address filtering system for their wireless and wired internet. Not much of a problem, but the system resets itself at 12:30AM every night. Still not much of an issue, except that I have my Xbox 360 up here for Netflix. Since there's no graphical browser for it, I can't access the login page. My workaround has been to disassociate my Macbook from the network, change its MAC address to match the Xbox, connected to the network, authorized said MAC address with the system, then repeated the steps to get my Macbook back on. My question is if there is some way I could write a shell script or Applescript to do this automatically?

I've already written a script to change the computer's MAC address to the Xbox, but I'm not sure how to join a network via CLI or Applescript. The order of business I would need is
  1. Disassociate Airport from current network via airport -z
  2. Spoof MAC address to match Xbox's
  3. Join network
  4. Open web browser, click accept on login page
  5. Repeat to get Macbook back on network
 
Sorry I can't answer your question directly.

But one other solution to this might be to use your macbook has a nat router.

  1. Connect to the hotel's wireless network on your macbook and do the authorisation stuff.
  2. Turn on internet sharing on your macbook so that ethernet is shared to wireless.
  3. Connect your xbox to your macbook via ethernet (LAN cable).
  4. Setup you xbox's network configuration so your macbook is the default router.
 
Sorry I can't answer your question directly.

But one other solution to this might be to use your macbook has a nat router.

  1. Connect to the hotel's wireless network on your macbook and do the authorisation stuff.
  2. Turn on internet sharing on your macbook so that ethernet is shared to wireless.
  3. Connect your xbox to your macbook via ethernet (LAN cable).
  4. Setup you xbox's network configuration so your macbook is the default router.

I've actually already had to do that. The problem is that I don't have a crossover cable long enough to reach from the Xbox to my Macbook on the couch. Additionally, the cable's snaplocks have broken off, so even a gentle snag on the cable unplugs it. Plus, I don't like having my laptop tied down, since it's supposed to be mobile...

My other thought on the matter is to spoof the MAC address of another router on the network. Since the individual routers aren't affected by the MAC address filtering, there must be a whitelist. I can get the MAC address of the router I'm connected to via arp -a, but the problem lies in kicking the other router off the network, since two identical MAC addresses can't exist on the network.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.