21 replies to this topic

[dagalicic]

I have two droid bionics running stock ICS OTA 6.7.246
I have rooted and installed safestrap 3 on both

On one have installed Black Hole 1.0

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On the other I have installed Eclipes 1.2.1

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My router is a D-Link DIR-615
DHCP enabled and secured with WPA/WPA2

Using Android System Info app from the market.

The stock ROM’s have different MAC and IP addresses but with different ROM’s they get the same MAC and IP addresses – see below

The Black Hole ROM on phone one has…
MAC address of 00:da:36:16:de:fb
IP Address of x.x.x.2

The Eclipes ROM on phone two has…
MAC address of 00:da:36:16:de:fb
IP Address of x.x.x.2

In my many years of network support on windows, I have never seen network cards change MAC addresses when installing different OS’s. I thought the MAC address was hard coded by the manufacture of the card.

My questions are…
Why do the two different phones with different ROMs have the same MAC and IP address?
Is there a way around this?
Was this coded by the developer?

Many thanks in advance to any solution or reason of why this is happening.
Dave

[johnlgalt]

I'm running Icarus HD Stripped 1.7 - I have almost the same MAC address as you.

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That's too close to yours to be a coincidence. It ***has*** to be scripted. I'm guessing that both of your ROMs are JB based?

If so, then that means that all these ROMs are using some component(s) that are the same for everyone - and that means that this needs to be fixed pronto so that each phone can use it's hard coded MAC address instead of this generic address.

Great find, time to do some digging as to why MAC address is even being coded into the software in the first place....

Sent from my ASUS Transformer Infinity TF700 running Android JB (rooted) via Tapatalk HD

[dagalicic]

Both my ROM's are ICS based according to the developers.

[johnlgalt]

Interesting. Time to find out was 2 ICS base ROMs and an ICS .247-based ROM with JB partials have in common. Sounds like fun!

Sent from my ASUS Transformer Infinity TF700 running Android JB (rooted) via Tapatalk HD

[jayrod]

Ummmm...yeah. I'm running Icarus 1.5 as my DD...and haven't looked at my 1.7 yet but I have the same numbers..

Sent from my Icarus HD Edition Bionic

[dagalicic]

this was taken from Black Hole 1.0.247 but it has the same results...
Hey everyone! This is the first

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based off of 6.7.247! It is Blackhole Bionic v1.0 by Sonofskywalker3...but instead of using the 232 base I used the 247 base This is probably the cleanest Rom you will find! It has been completely gutted of all garbage and is flashable on either Bootstrap or Safestrap..

this from Eclipse
Welcome to Eclipse for the Droid Bionic. As I normally do with my Motorola builds I remove just about as much blur as I can and replace them with their AOSP counterparts. I have compiled the AOSP apps against the Bionic framework for the best compatibility. All the AOSP apps are from my modded AOSP eclipse source. So they do come with extra goodies!
Moto based from the 246 OTA

don't know if this will help or not but...

[johnlgalt]

Anyone with root explorer / es explorer - can you verify the presence of the following line for me the file located in system/etc/wifi/hostapd.conf: (near the bottom of the file)

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Sent from my ASUS Transformer Infinity TF700 running Android JB (rooted) via Tapatalk HD

[jayrod]

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  110KB   59 downloads

Sent from my Icarus HD Edition Bionic

[johnlgalt]

I'm betting that is the key. Let me check.

Sent from my ASUS Transformer Infinity TF700 running Android JB (rooted) via Tapatalk HD

[dagalicic]

some more info...

I flashed SkyL1n3 ROM and MAC address is different yet but not the same as with the stock ROM.
also my system/etc/wifi/hostapd.conf file does not have the line "uuid" in it and is much smaller in length (number of lines)

hope this help in finding the solution to the issue.

[johnlgalt]

Any chance it is somewhere else, then say in another file?

Sent from my ASUS Transformer Infinity TF700 running Android JB (rooted) via Tapatalk HD

[nitephlight]

interesting.

i can confirm on stock my MAC address is much different than the ROMd versions. what you can try is doing a manual re-calibration of your WiFi using wifical.sh & wifiupgradecal.sh (/system/bin).

i *believe* /pds/wifi/nvs_map.bin is what is used to map your MAC address during wifi calibration but you may want to check the scripts.

[johnlgalt]

I would have thought that the MAC address would be hard coded into the WiFi radio. Seeing as it can be overridden / overwritten by software, that seems, to me, to pose a large risk when installing a custom ROM, as the OP has already noted.

Sent from my ASUS Transformer Infinity TF700 running Android JB (rooted) via Tapatalk HD

[johnlgalt]

Haven't found anything new. I need to figure out why this is happening so I can write a script to *prevent* it from happening again.

[chrisp6825]

Any news on this? I finally narrowed the problem my roommate and I have been running into for more than a while. The NVS file does seem to be the culprit, I read about a similar problem on the droid x, and found this..

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I'm not sure if those instructions can be followed on the bionic, but it sounds to me that creating/generating a new NVS file might use the hard coded mac.

This is a pressing issue for me, I'd love any tips or pointers

[johnlgalt]

I went bak to using stock so I dropped this.

Nitephlight is probably right, generating a new one in your ROM of choice is the best solution. Those scripts *should* be in there already, right?

Of course, that would rely on the ROM dev leaving them in and not stripping them out....

[chrisp6825]

Woah, totally missed that post, my apologies. Found this interesting in the first file..


# Leaving mac address field empty for random mac
calibrator plt autocalibrate wlan0 $WL12xx_MODULE $TARGET_INI_FILE $TARGET_NVS_FILE

Random thinking on lunch break makes me believe I could theoretically add in my primal Mac at the end of that line and have it inject that Mac. Seem plausible?
PS.. Randomly generate a mac? It doesn't seem random, and why not pull it from the chip itself?

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk 2

[johnlgalt]

That's what I've been wondering myself the entire time - why not just pull it form he existing hardware instead of using the same MAC over and over again when distributing a ROM? For less savvy people it could potentially be a deal breaker when trying out a ROM and another phone with another ROM is already on the network - a novice user will think it is the ROM that has problems when in fact it is a simple MAC address change and all is well.

There has to be a way to make it so that the MAC address is not pushed out automatically and thus the ROM uses what is already built into the current hardware that it is on.

[chrisp6825]

Found a solution, partly.
You must turn wifi off, and run these commands as root in a terminal/adb shell.

running this command will set a MAC address you define :

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These are the 3 nvs.bin files I found on my system. You can run the calibrator command on each to determine which is holding the MAC address that your system is reporting :

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/data/misc/wifi/firmware/wl12xx-nvs.bin
/system/etc/firmware/ti-connectivity/wl12xx-fac-nvs.bin
/system/etc/firmware/ti-connectivity/wl12xx-upd-nvs.bin

I'm running a JB blur rom, Flying Jelly. The one that contained my current MAC address was :
/system/etc/firmware/ti-connectivity/wl12xx-upd-nvs.bin

so an example would obviously be:

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I then rebooted before turning wifi on, turned it on after boot, and checked in system settings. The file wl12xx-upd-nvs.bin was the one that held my current address on my system. The file wl12xx-nvs.bin held an old MAC address, one that sticks even between FXZ's in my experience (it had the shared ICS mac). The only way I found to reset the true MAC address before this, was to FXZ back to 905 GB, then back to the ICS leak I was running, though that's no longer possible.
 

 
I think I may have found why we all have the same funky default MAC address on blur ROMs, but, if I'm right, I can't find out how to fix it due to a file missing : /system/etc/wifi/TQS_D_1.7.ini
I haven't bothered to boot over to a moto stock ROM to see if it's there. If anyone else wants to before I do, it'd be cool if you could confirm it's there, or pm the contents.
Found some file on the net with the same file name. It's contents match almost exactly with the contents of another .ini file in the same folder. It's just tx/rx settings, nothing directly relating to mac addresses. I'm curious if creating the TQS_D_1.7.ini file and re-run the wifical.sh script, if I'd get a unique MAC address.. too scared to try for fear of some settings possibly being incorrect and frying my board.
 

 
By the way, this is not spoofing the MAC, it's basically changing the firmware file outright.
 
 

[dagalicic]

i would like to give this a try.  where do i enter these commands? does any one have a script to run?