Bypassing Restrictive Mac Address Filtering on Home Network
A short sketch of my situation before I formulate my question: I am on a large home network, which is privately administered by a couple of admins. The network consists of a lan and a wireless lan, and controls access centrally by filtering mac addresses (and denying/allowing based on whether they allow that specific mac address).
The problem is that the wireless access is very unreliable, and is unusable for me. The admins of the network don’t have a lot of time and are a little lax, so they won’t help me with my wireless access problems, even after repeated complaints. They basically told me to fix it myself. Which leaves me with a connection that I’m paying for, but unable to use. I don’t have control over the main routers, so I am kind of cut off from the internet on my laptop because of this, which is very frustrating.
Fortunately, the mac address filtering is rather simple. The wireless mac address that I’ve registered does not allow me to access the cable lan part of the network. So I have only one valid mac address (from the desktop) that is allowed on the cable lan part of the network.
What I would do is get another networking card for your desktop and a router that is also wifi capable. Get a box that’s DD-wrt/open-wrt capable and change the MAC address to the one of your desktop or just get them to insert the MAC address of your router. After that you can just use your own router as WIFI AP and physical internet AP. No you won’t be able to discover other devices.
I’m not sure how the auto discovery function works, but I think it will scan devices in the same subnet. Since you are behind another router this will not be case. What you can try is to directly connect to the ip of the fileserver.