Does your Mac Ethernet/Wireless keep giving you a fake 169.254.x.x ip address?

Recently I started running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.8) on my spare computer. It worked fine for a few days until one day when I changed my router, my Mac stopped connecting to the router. It would repeatedly get a 169.254.x.x ip address through DHCP. If I set the IP address manually, it would show that it assigned the IP address, yet it would still not “properly” be connected in the background.

So here is what I did to fix this problem. Open up Terminal using Spotlight. And type the command:

sudo ifconfig en0 ether 00:11:22:33:44:55

It will then ask you for your password. That’s it.

Explanation:

sudo: Gives you administrative power

ifconfig: the program that interacts with all your connectivity configurations

en0: the interface’s name, it could also be en1, en2, etc. (depending on the amount of network wired/wireless cards you have)

00:11:22:33:44:55: the mac address, pick whatever hex combination (i.e. only use characters 0-9 and a-z)

Please share your experiences.