Quote Originally Posted by ranmaaaron
is there any way to change the mac address that knoppix uses because i know that my isp will only alow one mac address out and i read in another post that it is posible but not common for knoppix to change the mac address by it self.
The MAC address is dtermined by a EEROM on the NIC, all NICs are made with a unique MAC addres. Knoppix should be using the exact same MAC address as when the same NIC is used under windows. There was one report a couple of years ago where this was said to not happen, but I've never seen it fail to work properly myself, particularly on my CNet NIC.

To answer your question, yes, Linux (and Knoppix) can tell the stack to use a different MAC address than what is assigned to the NIC by the EEROM. I'm not sure of the exact command to use to do it though, but you should be able to find it with a little searching on Google faster than waiting for someone to give it to you here.

But if, as I have speculated, there is a router built into your modem, then the ISP only sees the MAC address of the router, not of any of your computers. MAC addresses are not routable across the Internet, they apply only to the local network and are stopped at the first router. If you have determined that the modem does not include a router then something really nasty is going on. Maybe you ISP is doing NAT on his end and giving you a non-routable IP address. That would not be good, it would greatly limit what you could do with your Internet connection. But it really doesn't look like that is happening in your case.