Apparently, the amount of information I do not possess will always be more than I have the time or the inclination to pursue. BUT, today I do have both, and so I am hot on the track of making things work that need to work for me to be happy that I have pursued everything I need to pursue. I will present this in reverse chronological order, so that my motivation is clear.
1. Currently, I am downloading XcodeTools1.5 from Apple. Why this version and not the most recent version? Simply because I have Panther (10.3) instead of Tiger (10.4), and the latest version only works on Tiger.
2. I am downloading this developer tools package because I need to use the command gcc in the terminal. Apparently, gcc is a command that just doesn’t come with the OS. I don’t know what it does, it seems to be some sort of C compiler, but I may eb way off. In any case, I need to download these tools to make my OS let me type gcc and have it do what I want it to do.
3. I need gcc to install the program aspoof (which is in itself an OS extension, as far as I can tell). See, I run the install package (a Perl script, that in itself fun and new to me), and it installs aaspoof, the program I really want, but which needs to run aspoof in order to function correctly.
4. But what does aaspoof do? It is a shortcut to aspoof, which asks for command lines only when it is installed. Since the command lines will never change (which would be detrimental to the computer working right, something I experienced last night), it is a very good little timesaver.
5. aspoof in itself is a script to modify the extension that drives the Airport Xtreme card in my Powerbook.
6. I want to mess with this file (yes, I even tried last night, by hand, with a Hex editor) because I want to change (“spoof”) my MAC address.
7. Finally, I want to do this a) because I have a random theory that the place I am receiving my wifi access from has blocked my MAC address so I cannot use that access point and b) because this has become an obsession since I have little else to fill my time with right now. [EDIT: I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the case, but you know what they say about idle hands… 2014-02-07]
Wikipedia has a fairly decent article on MAC addresses, if you want to know more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
aspoof can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/aspoof.
hey.
I’m actually the guy that wrote aspoof. Let me know if you actually got it to work, if not I’d like to help. Also, I only wrote the code for Tiger, however if you still have not upraded I can update the package so that it actually works with Panther as well. The only difference is the hex strings that need to be changed