[ale] Bye-bye, Telocity/DirectTV

[Jim Popovitch]

A little correction is order, although most of these posts have been somewhat
accurate the following applies to all newer DOCSIS compatible cable modems. 
First, AT&T  doesn't grab your PC's MAC address, your cable modem does.  And it
doesn't go any further than that.  AT&T is only concerned w/ your cable modem's
MAC address (printed on the side or bottom of the device).  AT&T maps that MAC
address to a private 10.x.x.x address that it uses to tunnel data to and from
your house.  The last 3 MAC addresses are stored in the cable modem (this is a
DOCSIS spec, not necessarily AT&T's), and are available via snmpget from that
private IP address.  If you hook the cablemodem directly to your linux box,
tcpdump will ultimately reveal the private IP address.  You can then run
snmpwalk (community=public) to read all of the modem's settings.  You can then
proceed to read all of your neighbor's settings by incrementing or decrementing
the IP address.  Finally, if you knew the write/right community string, you
could modify transmission.127.1.1.3.1.3.1 to increase your upstream bandwidth
setting.  Get the DOCSIS MIBs for Net-Snmp if you want to see names instead of
OIDs.  No, I don't know the password for the Atlanta area, and if I did I
wouldn't tell you.  Now, back to the MAC address issue: Since they are stored
in the cable modem, all you have to do is power it down for 30 to 45 minutes
and the next MAC address it sees will work.

Ymmv, mine is based on intimate DOCSIS experience with multiple cable modem
vendors and broadband providers.

-Jim P.

--- Stephen VanDyke <mail at stephenvandyke.com> wrote:
> AT&T grabs the MAC address from whatever NIC gets installed first. My
> roommate and I tried to get them to change it when we were trying to move
> our connection to a linux router. We ended up getting a linksys router that
> can fake the mac address to the gateway device and things were solved. I'm
> pretty sure Linux can fake it too but we could never get it to work.
> 
> -Stephen VanDyke


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