“Most of us have a steady stream of visitors to our houses—friends, family, landlords, pizza delivery guys, Airbnb travelers—and many of them are going to want access to your wi-fi at some point,” David Nield writes for Gizmodo.
“he normal process would be to hand over the passcode printed on the back of your router, but there’s actually a much better option: a guest access point,” Nield writes. “The main advantage is that this separate network (which appears as a different SSID or network name) is locked out of the rest of your devices. Things like network printers, NAS drives, shared files, and other sensitive network information won’t be available from the guest access point. You’re essentially giving people internet access—and that’s it.”
“Having two wi-fi networks—one for you, one for guests—lets you configure each one for specific needs,” Nield writes. “For example, you can turn off the guest network without affecting anyone one the primary network. You can also restrict how much bandwidth your guest network is allowed to use if you don’t want your guests doing any illegal downloading.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s easy for owners of Apple AirPort base stations to allow guests to use their Internet connection without sharing their password or giving guests access to the rest of your network.
Simply enable the guest networking feature using AirPort Utility and create a separate Wi-Fi network just for guests. Owners can set up the guest network with a different password or with none at all. The primary network, including the owner’s printer(s), attached drives, or other devices remains secure.
To set up a guest network, the AirPort wireless device must be set up to share its public IP address using DHCP and NAT.
1. Open AirPort Utility, located in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder.
2. Select the wireless device on which you want to set up a guest network, then click Edit. Enter the password if necessary.
3. Click Wireless, then select Enable Guest Network.
4. Give the guest network a name.
5. Choose None, WPA/WPA2 Personal, or WPA 2 Personal from the Guest Network Security pop-up menu, and then type a password for the guest network.Users wanting to join the guest network will then need to enter the guest password, of course.