A 48-bit MAC address (e.g., 08:4f:b5:05:56:a0) is a globally unique identifier associated with a physical network interface, which is assigned by a manufacturer of the corresponding network interface card. Higher 24 bits in a MAC address (also known as OUI or "Organizationally Unique Identifier") uniquely identify the organization which has issued the MAC address, so that there is no conflict among all existing MAC addresses.

While a MAC address is a manufacturer-assigned hardware address, it can actually be modified by a user. This practice is often called "MAC address spoofing." In this tutorial, I am going to show how to spoof the MAC address of a network interface on Linux.

When you are tasked with monitoring network traffic on the local network, you can consider many different options to do it, depending on the scale/traffic of the local network, monitoring platforms/interface, types of backend database, etc.

ntopng is an open-source (GPLv3) network traffic analyzer which provides a web interface for real-time network traffic monitoring. It runs on multiple platforms including Linux and MacOS X. ntopng comes with a simple RMON-like agent with built-in web server capability, and uses Redis-backed key-value server to store time series statistics. You can install ntopng network traffic analyzer on any designated monitoring server connected to your network, and use a web browser to access real-time traffic reports available on the server.