While thinking about the Problem that is MATLAB once more, the real solution to starting matlab offline became obvious: Only spoof the Mac address for MATLAB itself without influencing other software running on the same machine. In order to make this work we will have to change the outcome of the ioctrl syscall, which MATLAB uses to determine the MAC Address of the HW adapter. Fortunaly, that was already done here , which will work for matlab just fine. If you are using Arch Linux then rejoice, for I packaged this little library in the AUR (named libmacspoof ). The Package will install libmacspoof.so.1.0.1 under /usr/lib, which is the assumption below. If you compiled the library yourself, you will have to change the path to it in the two lines of script. Making matlab use the new ioctl That part is charmingly simple: open the script that is the matlab command with sudo nano $(which matlab) and change the first line from #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/sh export MAC_ADDRESS=...