https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40247
Bug ID: 40247 Summary: Wine returns bad MAC address for loopback interface, fails to run licensed programs. Product: Wine Version: unspecified Hardware: x86 OS: Mac OS X Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: normal Priority: P2 Component: netcfgx Assignee: wine-bugs@winehq.org Reporter: alexchandel@gmail.com
There are some (poorly written) programs that base their licensing off the system's MAC address. Unfortunately, some of them are necessary for engineering work. These are old programs with brittle source but valid licenses that cannot be run because Wine cannot ever tell them what Windows would tell them.
Wine always returns a MAC address of "00:00:00:00:00:00" to these programs. I assume that's because the loopback interface is first in `ifconfig`, and thus is enumerated first to Windows programs by Wine, and has no MAC address.
In most cases, programs like these choose the MAC address of the first "network adapter" that would have been printed by `ipconfig /all`. Again, in Wine, the first such adapter printed is the loopback interface.
This problem can't be solved by normal MAC address spoofing techniques, because the loopback interface simply doesn't have a MAC address according to the host.
And Windows tricks to change the MAC address, like modifying the "NetworkAddress" key of "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class{4d36e972-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\XXXX", don't seem to have any effect in Wine. Particularly with respect to affecting the loopback interface.
There needs to be a Wine option, possibly a key somewhere in "HKLM\Software\Wine", to override (at the very least) the loopback interface's apparent MAC address, so that these programs can work.