Cloning mac address??

whats with this changing the mac address thg?whats actually happpening and how does it happen??

and why is it specifically called ';cloning'; why not jsut changing??

some of my frends who have intel lan card can chagne their mac and subsequently their ip address but ppl who have realtek lan card are not able to do so even though they have the option to change.Cloning mac address??
MAC addresses are burned into the networking hardware. They are, in theory, unique in the world. Cloning is a software process that translates the MAC address when sending packets.Cloning mac address??
Virtuall all operating systems allow you to change the MAC address of a NIC. MAC ';cloning'; is the practice of changing your MAC address to that of one that is authorized on a system.



Since it is childs play to determine the MAC addresses of all NICs on an unencrypted network, MAC filtering is a very poor way to secure a network.



The advanced properties for any NIC has an option for changing the MAC address, including Realtek. Sometimes it's called ';locally administered address'; or someting similar, but the option is there for all NICs.
MAC cloning can be very useful when troubleshooting network problemsor monitoring specific machines, but both 1 and 2 are correct