Hi & thanks in advance,
I have a kali guest in a vmware vm. And I'm using a USB ethernet dongle that is passed directly to the guest machine.

So I have a wired connection on 'eth1' and I want its MAC to be 'aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa'.

Code:
sudo ip link set eth1 down
sudo iplink set dev eth1 address aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa
sudo ip link set eth1 up
However when the interface is up I find that the MAC is set as 'bb:bb:bb:bb:bb:bb'.

If I check the MAC while the interface is down the MAC is 'aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa'.
If the interface is up but the ethernet cable is disconnected the MAC is 'aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa'

Unplugging and plugging the usb dongle appears to increment some kind of interface counter but it keeps the interface name as 'eth1'.

Changing the 'cloned-mac-address' in "/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/Wired\ connection\ 1 " also doesn't seem to affect my results.