Hello friends, I decided to write this guide after seeing multiple forum members raise suspicion to the possibility of reoccurring bans or a ban to a fresh account being the result of a "flagged IP address". Since changing your IP is so simple, I find it to be a waste of time to speculate if/when this happens, or under what circumstances. So let's just get right into the process. What you need to make this work: In addition to a standard Cable Modem, you will need to have a Router for this to work. The visual aids in this guide are from a Netgear router unless specified otherwise, but the method we are using is mostly universal for all routers. You will need a Dynamic IP address, I don't think this works if your ISP has assigned a static IP. Step-by-step Guide Before doing anything, note that this process will disconnect you from the internet. You should save this section of the guide to a notepad or at least read it all the way through before beginning. Additionally, you should note your current public IP address. You can do this simply by typing "ip" into the Google search engine. Step 1: Determine how to access your router's configuration page through your web browser. The most commonly used address for this page is "http://192.168.1.1", but I have supplied a larger list in the spoiler below. This information can also be easily retrieved from Google if your brand is not listed or if the information is incorrect. You need to register and have one post to see spoilers! Step 2: Determine the login information for your router. Your Username/Password will either be factory default, or some information you have set and should already know. If you need to know the factory default login information for your router, you can use this website. http://www.routerpasswords.com/ If you have changed this information and can not remember, you will need to factory reset your router to continue. Step 3: Once logged in, you will be at your router configuration home page. This is where the guide will differentiate per brand. For Netgear this setting is listed under the "Internet" tab. The section you are looking for is titled "Router MAC address", if you have a different brand router it might be called "MAC Address Clone". In any case, you are looking for a segment of 12 characters/numbers broken into 6 pairs separated by colons. I have supplied pictures for Netgear and Linksys in the spoiler below. You need to register and have one post to see spoilers! Step 4: Once you have located the area for MAC Address Cloning, enable it and a random set of 12 characters/numbers will appear. This is your new cloned MAC address, but we aren't done yet. Please read this step and step 5 completely before pressing save/edit/continue, etc. Note: If you are enabling MAC address clone for the first time, you can continue to step 5. The next thing you should do is look at the last two pairs in your MAC address, here's a random example: [2D-A6]. You will want to change the numerical values here to any other even number. So for this example my new string would end with [4D-A8]. Step 5: At this point you should be looking at your router configuration page, with your new/edited MAC address present on the page. Here's the most important part of the guide. Before saving that new MAC address, you need to physically unplug your CABLE MODEM from the power source. Note that you are NOT unplugging your router. Once you have unplugged your CABLE MODEM you can save the changes you made to your MAC address. Some routers will take up to a minute to solidify the changes you have just made, but you should get some kind of message once it is successful. After that you can plug your cable modem back in and wait for it to boot back up. Since you have powercycled the modem, this process can take 3-5 minutes. If it has been more than 5 minutes and your connection is just NOT coming back on, you may need to go back to step 4 and try a different set of even numbers. This is rarely an issue, but does happen on occasion. Step 6: Once your connection is back online, navigate to google and check your IP again by typing "IP" into the search engine. If you have done everything correctly you should now be displaying a new Public IP. Congratulations! Additional Notes You can do this as many times as you want, as often as you want. The person that taught this method to me explained the change in IP address occurs because once your cable modem is back online it is tricked into thinking it is in a new location, so it assigns a new IP. This may or may not be true, but either way you get a new public IP out of the deal.
Great question, two answers, most people probably aren't going to like either of them. The first one definitely works, the second one may work for some people and not for others. 1. If you value your personal security (in all applications, not just wow) it would be worth separating your hardware. The modem/router all-in-one combos that are usually assigned to you from your ISP allows them a degree of control over your firewall settings in the router. The point of a router in the first place is to block all unwanted access, even from your ISP. If you had a router in the form of a separate piece of hardware, your ISP will only have access to your modem, like it was back in the good ole days. The easiest way for you to gain a degree of your personal security back, as well as being able to use this guide to clone your MAC address would be to access your combo hardware settings and enable bridge mode, which would disable the internal router and allow you to connect a separate, and safer third party one. 2. There's a chance with your combo unit that you could clone the MAC address and then do a cold boot. So after you save your new cloned MAC address settings you would need to unplug your cable modem completely, if it has a backup battery you would need to remove that too. From there you would need to power off anything you have connected to the network via ethernet cable/wifi, essentially so all of your hardware on the network "goes dark". After a good minute or two completely powered down you can restart power to the modem, if you have individual control within the combo unit restore power to the modem first, then the router. From there you can power on everything you turned off earlier. With the new MAC address (cloned) and new network coming online there's a good chance your ISP will think you are connecting new hardware and assign you a new IP. There are actually a lot of videos for this on youtube, some people report having to leave their hardware off for 3 hours for a cold boot to properly assign a new IP. That's why I posted the preferred method above, since you can do it in less than 10 minutes once you get used to it. Personal opinion wise, I would say no where near 99% of the population use modem/router combos. Also best to avoid them if you have that option, I suppose it's not going to make a difference for most people though.
Good guide! I had to come up with something similar for forcing an IP change out of my ISP. It was slightly easier than your method; change the MAC address of my main "server" PC with any program, Clone the computer MAC address on the router, Restart everything, voilà. I couldn't do this with the ISP modem since I could not change it's MAC; but by setting the modem in bridge mode and using a tplink router for DHCP , I managed to make it. It took a lot of trial and error, but it felt great when I got it!
