it’s been a long and challenging 24 hours as I got back from Vacation to find my internet connection cut off from a ‘known outage’… And after all that fun, and actually walking thru some techsupport hell from Charter I found out two fun things….
Charter doesn’t like Belkin routers, and will mac filter them from time to time.. But it is easily fixed when they have you put in the MAC of a PC to connect, then just clone the thing.  The paranoid in me cannot help but think that they want to associate some MAC address with me, for some weird reason…
The other being that I could *NOT* remember my WAP password to save my life after having to disassociate myself from my wifi network.
Luckily there is Nirsoft’s “wireless_key”
Oh well such is life, I’m just glad I took an extra vacation day (like it matters….) but hell it sucks when the teleco is down hard.
So why would my ISP want to know a MAC of an inside machine? Â I sure hope me running YaCy for a full 24 hours wasn’t some kind of driving reason behind this….
“Block from time to time”? I’ve heard of ISPs doing a lot of stupid things, and this is probably one of the crazier ones I’ve heard (locking you to a single MAC is another, which is why pretty much every SoHo router out there lets you set/clone the MAC).
If you don’t want to reveal your private MAC address to the ISP, just generate a random one – all you need to watch out for is that the first octet is even (that is, in xY:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, Y must not be 1,3,5,7,9,B,D or F, as that denotes multicast addresses), set that on the WAN port of your router, and get the ISP to accept that. Something like 02:60:0D:C0:FF:EE should work just fine.
I was going to use some kind of old DEC MAC for the fun of it, but it was 6AM when they cleared the general network is down and we know about it message… And I foolishly plugged in a laptop as they demanded… One thing that bothers me about the Apple airports is that they do not let you change their MAC addresses.. I had an ISP that would regularly block me for no reason… But it is funny when they blame your home network as being the root cause, and I change my MAC and it amazingly works… No doubt its a scam, I figure they must change for their own wifi routers that nobody buys not to mention tech onsite visits.