Background
A short sketch of my situation before I formulate my question: I am on a large home network, which is privately administered by a couple of admins. The network consists of a lan and a wireless lan, and controls access centrally by filtering mac addresses (and denying/allowing based on whether they allow that specific mac address).
I have two computers that I have registered and use (and pay for monthly) on this network, one wireless connection (laptop) and one cable connection (desktop). So I have two mac addresses that are allowed on the network, and are allowed access to the internet through the network.
The problem
The problem is that the wireless access is very unreliable, and is unusable for me. The admins of the network don't have a lot of time and are a little lax, so they won't help me with my wireless access problems, even after repeated complaints. They basically told me to fix it myself. Which leaves me with a connection that I'm paying for, but unable to use. I don't have control over the main routers, so I am kind of cut off from the internet on my laptop because of this, which is very frustrating.
My (partial) solution
Fortunately, the mac address filtering is rather simple. The wireless mac address that I've registered does not allow me to access the cable lan part of the network. So I have only one valid mac address (from the desktop) that is allowed on the cable lan part of the network.
What I have done is patch a small router (E-Tech RTVP03) to the main network, change it's mac address to the allowed (desktop) mac address, and patch my computer and laptop to the router. This sort of works (internet access works), but there are some problems that I wasn't able to fix:
- The mac address of my router and desktop computer network card is now the same, which causes a lot of conflicts. I have tried to change the mac address of my network card, but that didn't help (or maybe the changing of the mac address didn't work, I'm not sure).
- Because the router is between my computers and the rest of the network, I can no longer discover any other computers on the network. Which is a shame, because we share a lot of files on it. Could I change the settings so this becomes a possibility again?
My question
So basically, what I want the router to do, is be as transparent as possible, and only change the mac address information that is passed to the main network (to bypass the mac filtering), and to allow me to share one connection over two computers.
I still want to be able to share files with the main network, and all I want to do is to be able to connect both my computers to the cable network, and have full internet (and network) access with them (because after all, I'm paying for it).
Can anyone come up with a good solution for this?