Reliance Broadnet and MAC Address Cloning

Posted by 7sins|Mixed-Up, Routers, Time Pass|5 Comments

I have long shifted to Reliance Broadnet after a fairly long stint with BSNL.
The day I was given the connection I had connected the CAT5 cable directly to my PC’s LAN port.

Everything was working like a smooth oiled machine till I bought my Linksys WRT54GL and installed Tomto Firmware on it and then configured QoS for the same.
The setup worked fine for quite a few days after which all hell broke loose…


I was not able to connect to the Internet. The main reason being my router was not able to acquire a public IP address from the DHCP server.
It would show the IP address as

0.0.0.0

I tried a lot of things:

1. Reboot the router. Both the hard reboot and the soft reboot.
2. Re-installed the default Linksys Firmware.
3. Formatting my PC (I still dont know why in the name of god i did that insane thing)
4. Banging my head on the wall

Next I connected the CAT5 cable directly to the PC’s LAN port and lo!!! my net was working again.

I concluded that the authentication mechanism involved the verification of the PC’s MAC address. Since i had initially connected the CAT5 cable directly to my PC, the PC’s MAC address got registered.

So to get the router up and working I had to assign the router’s Internet port, the PC’s MAC address.

Since I had installed Tomato, I navigated to the option

Advanced > MAC Address

There was the WAN port waiting for me to change the MAC Address.

I changed the WAN port’s MAC address to that of the PC’s MAC address and then saved the settings.

A small restart of some internal services and lo my net started working again.

This was the practical instance of my first attempt at MAC Address cloning and I should say that boy I am satisfied with my work.

So any of you Reliance Broadnet users, if you are also stuck with the same problem, go ahead clone that MAC Address.

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