Sky Wireless Connector - MAC Filtering

Nuno

This may be in the wrong thread, so pardon me Mods if it is. I've just ordered and received a Wireless Connector from Sky and went about hooking it up to my network last night.
Being a paranoid sort of chappy, I have MAC filtering enabled on my network. So, when I looked underneath the wireless connector, I see a sticker with a 12 digit alphanumeric code, and I think sweet, there's the mac address for the device.
So I entered the code into my white list on the router, hooked up the connector to the sky box, and........ nothing. I could not get it to connect. Maybe there was a cock up at the manufacturer and the MAC address on the sticker might not match the actual MAC address of the device. So, I hook it up to the laptop, ipconfig /all, and hey presto, the mac address displayed on the screen is completely different to what I see on the sticker. So again, I add this new mac address to my white list and once again, no joy.

After all that my question is, has anyone successfully hooked up one of these wireless connectors to their network and managed to get mac filtering to work?

MBSnr

Can you turn off Mac filtering - allow the device to connect, then copy and paste its MAC (which should be listed in the router someplace - maybe with the DHCP IP) into the whitelist.

If you can't find it in the router then get it from the laptop by pinging the wireless device's IP (listed in DHCP on the router) and then type "arp -a" from a DOS/command line to get the MAC that way. Then paste it into the whitelist and turn MAC filtering back on.

ipconfig /all is only going to list the MAC addresses on your laptop for it's own wireless and ethernet ports.

Nuno

Thanks MBSnr.. will try that when I get home tonight

MBSnr

Thinking about it - the IP listed in DHCP may be that of the Sky box and not the wireless Sky device as it's possible it may not not have an IP and just act as a pass through device for the box. (Depends - some Access Points have an IP for managing them - the Sky one may not).

Although the MAC you should see will be the Sky device wireless one and not the Sky box one. Best to get it working without filtering first then you have a baseline to work from.

Nuno

MBSnr wrote: »

Best to get it working without filtering first then you have a baseline to work from.

I should have mentioned, I got it working yesterday no problem once I had disabled MAC Filtering, so I know there's no problem there.... but I'm stubborn, and I like the extra security of the whitelist. Hopefully, it's just a case that I haven't been using the correct mac address.

Thanks again

Nuno

So this is weird..

When I got home tonight, I checked the DHCP list whilst the mac filtering was off, and I see 3 devices connected. The 1st is the Sky Wireless Connector with an IP Address of 192.168.1.3, and the 2nd is the Sky+ HD Box with an IP Address of 192.168.1.4. The 3rd device is my PC, which is the only device with a wired connection to the router. In case you're wondering, I turned off all other wireless devices in the house (missus' laptop, Xbox etc..) which could connect to the network before refreshing the DHCP list.

The DHCP list also gave me the mac addresses for all the connected devices, so I added the Sky Box and the Wireless Connector to the routers whitelist. I turned the mac filtering back on and.....still no joy

btw.. I'm using a Vodafone At Home EchoLife HG556a Router

MBSnr

Is there any means of getting a cable from the router to the Sky box to see if it works with the MAC filter on and the Sky wireless device removed?

I have same router but no Sky wireless. I'll have a look at the MAC filtering this weekend. To be honest MAC filtering isn't worth it. The MAC address of your allowed wireless device can be 'sniffed' by an eavesdropper anyhow, so they'd know which MAC addresses are allowed so they can spoof it. Or course if you use WPA2 and a long multiple char random keyphrase it'll take days to crack...... but then you have to ask why would anyone bother for a home internet connection, when there's easier fish out there?

Nuno

The router has separate whitelists for wireless vs hardwired devices on the network, so for now MAC filtering is enabled on wireless devices only. But to be honest, I think this one may have gotten the better of me.... for now I've turned MAC filtering off, and it may just stay that way since everything is working fine....... ho hum.

Thanks very much for all your replies MBSnr, much appreciated.

watty

MAC filtering is nearly pointless actually, it's not effective security at all.

paulvdm

I got me one of these sky wireless adapters today, and also have the mac address fitlering. I know it's a less then perfect security feature, but use it non the less. I too went the way of disabling mac address filtering to hook up this box to discover it's mac on the lan list of wifi router, then I also found out that there were 2 devices, the sky box and the wireles adapter both have an ip and mac, added both in my filter and re-enabled filter. It stopped working. dung.. So then disabled mac address filtering, worked again. But I noticed the wireless adapter mac changed one digit, the last digit was 0 but now 1. So added that 3rd mac address to the list, and working since. Not sure what it is, the mac on the box and device is ending 0.. but don't care, as long as it works.

Traction

I'm the same.
I was wondering where all the addresses are coming from.

When I setup the box there are 3 addresses on the network.
One of them identifies itself on the network as sky wireless box.
One of the other addresses matches the IP address that the Sky Box says it has on the network details of the sky menu.
The other address which ends in the 0 had me confused.